A Quiet Place

Horror films love a good gimmick. After all, there are only so many ways you can show people being stalked and slashed before you need to throw in a surprising quirk. What if the boogie man only attacks in dreams (A Nightmare on Elm Street)? What if this ghost story is all filmed on a camcorder (The Blair Witch Project)? What if these aliens only attack in the dark (Pitch Black)? 

A Quiet Place, the third feature from John Krasinski, has a humdinger of a gimmick: what if these monsters hunt by hearing alone? To survive, you mustn’t make a sound.

This is the lesson a family of five learn the hard way in the opening minutes of this fat-free shocker, which is both wonderfully tense and breathtakingly brutal. The majority of A Quiet Place takes place a few years after this prologue, with most of the Earth's population either dead or in hiding, and the family unit now numbering four. Krasinski plays the father, Emily Blunt the mother, and Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds, the young deaf actor who starred in Wonderstruck, are the couple’s children. The mysterious beasts with incredibly sensitive lugholes are still stalking the Earth listening out for the slightest of sounds on which to pounce, but the family are using some ingenious methods in which to eke out a practically soundless existence in an abandoned farmhouse.

Talking is out of the question, but luckily everyone is proficient in sign language, owing to the fact the daughter of the family is deaf. The nature of the creatures and their origins doesn’t come up in signed conversation over the dinner table or while they’re playing Monopoly, but expositional clues lay scattered throughout the house in the form of yellowing press clippings pinned around the basement and a whiteboard with the chief bullet points about the creatures handily jotted down, including the kicker question: “what’s their weakness?”.

The things patrolling the property aren’t the only worry: the relationship between father and daughter is strained. Dad seems standoffish towards her, perhaps because of the tragedy that opens the film, and he refuses to let her join him and her brother on excursions beyond the boundaries of the farm. It’s a decision that’s particularly infuriating for the daughter as she’s clearly made of much tougher stuff than her sibling. But then who could blame the lad for being skittish? “There’s nothing to be scared of,” Krasinski assures the doe-eyed Jupe in sign language before their expedition. “Of course there is,” says the exasperated son in one of the film’s few darkly comic moments.

Blunt's character has even more to worry about: she’s heavily pregnant and due any day now. We doubt a newborn baby is going to comply with the household’s 'no sounds above the faintest of whispers' rule.

Krasinski works wonders with his actors, who communicate a world of emotion through pensive looks and glances. We know next to nothing about them other than they're soulful and scared, and that's more than enough to keep us rooting for them. Krasinski proves pretty nifty when it comes to the action sequences too, particularly during an extraordinary set-piece in the middle of the movie that generates most of its gut-wrenching tension from a single nail that’s ominously protruding from a floorboard.

What loosens the film’s grip is that you can see most of the plot twists coming a mile off. Even more disappointing is the uninspired creature design. Once again it appears the Earth has been invaded by a version of those spindly bug-like CGI aliens that crop up in everything from Starship Troopers to Cloverfield. A Quiet Place’s pace is so relentless, however, that these gripes don’t really start to niggle until the credits roll.

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Released by Paramount