I finally got around to watching A Quiet Place, which was a nice change of pace in a world full of adaptations and reboots. It not only demonstrates the virtues of creating something new but also matching the right story with the right medium.
The 2018 horror movie focuses on one family trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. They must live in total silence and communicate primarily through sign language because even faint sounds lure powerful monsters who possess extraordinary hearing.
It’s not a silent movie, but it’s the next closest thing. And any sound that does emerge becomes all the more meaningful, even jarring, when surrounded by such pervasive silence. Sound equals danger, but silence demands a release. The movie taps into that primal childhood fear of strange noises in the middle of the night, which are only amplified due how to quiet everything else is.
This premise requires visual storytelling, so a novel wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective. A comic book or graphic novel would work better than a prose novel, but that would still sacrifice the deliberate use of sound. A television series would stretch the premise beyond its breaking point, as it starts to fall apart the more you think about it. (So would a sneeze be a death sentence? What about the creaks of a house settling? Why doesn’t the family move near that roaring river to cloak themselves in the noises of nature?)
A Quiet Place needs to be a movie, and it needs to be a tightly focused movie. And the script by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, and John Krasinski is indeed focused. It doesn’t overexplain the premise. We don’t get any convoluted backstory about how these monsters arrived. Running only 90 minutes, the film ends before we have too much time to overthink things. There’s no sprawling cast full of disposable characters.
The movie credits a lean cast of six, and we spend most of our time with four of them. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski play the parents, and Millicent Simmons and Noah Jupe play the kids.
(Minor spoilers ahead for both movies, but I’ll try not to reveal too much since these are still fairly recent.)
The family dynamic is key, and it elevates the movie beyond mere horror (a genre I’ve never been a fan of). The movie isn’t just about avoiding death—it’s about parents going to tremendous lengths to protect their kids, and that gives the audience something solid to latch onto. Plus, the movie opens with a failure that raises the stakes for the remainder of the runtime.
This reminds me of the current HBO series The Last of Us, which needs to be about more than just avoiding fungus zombies (and so far is). Characters can’t be mere targets; they need to be people with relatable motivations beyond mere survival.
A Quiet Place works as a tense, standalone short story. It ends at an intriguing spot, but there’s no need for anything more.
However, the movie performed well financially, so we got more.
And Then There Was Part II …
The YouTube channel Filmento does an excellent job of outlining where A Quiet Place Part II goes wrong, so I refer you to them. Spoilers within.
It’s always possible to pull off an unnecessary sequel. This one is entertaining enough, but it doesn’t justify going any further. Part II expands the world without raising the stakes or further developing the established characters. It goes bigger in some ways, but no additional mass accompanies the extra size, leaving the whole thing feeling hollow.
Also, I was expecting Emily Blunt’s character to emerge as the hero of this movie, sort of like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Aliens franchise. But no.
Still, the sequel doesn’t detract from the first movie. It merely confirms that sometimes a movie works best as a visual short story, and the studio should stop while it’s ahead (I mean creatively, not financially).
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Taking a look at historical fiction this time …