FILM OF THE WEEK
A Quiet Place
Cert: 15A; Now showing
A husband and wife (John Krasinksi and real-life partner Emily Blunt, pictured) walk through an empty and silent rural dystopian landscape with their three young children and a few supplies. They communicate only through sign language and tread barefoot along carefully placed pathways of sand that dampen the noise of their footsteps.
All bets are off from the very start, we quickly learn. An all-pervading and shockingly efficient threat exists out beyond the trees surrounding their farm that will come for them if it hears them. To make matters even more interesting, daughter Regan (teenager Millicent Simmonds in her second big-screen showing this week) is deaf while mum Evelyn is expecting any day now.
After a thankless few years of cheap recycled tosh, horror films have picked up of late thanks to cerebral and sensory masterworks such as The Babadook, It Follows and Get Out. A directorial debut for Krasinski (who came to our attention as Jim in the US version of The Office), A Quiet Place fits neatly into this latter-day canon because of its fresh, economical approach, relatable characters and its well-mapped undulations of tension and relief. The excellent core cast — Blunt and Simmonds (who is deaf in real life) are outstanding — and the light touches throughout the screenplay (co-written by Krasinski with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) give off a very strong sense that this is an otherwise normal family unit. This is key. While the actual design of the monsters themselves is slightly shoddy looking — think something picked up from the Resident Evil cutting floor — in a way it doesn’t really matter so much. It is more about what they represent and the dynamics that this danger places in front of the small family. Only by sticking together will they survive the perils of this world — not a particularly original moral but here delivered in unforgettable style. So while A Quiet Place is intense, terrifying and tidy — it clocks in at a merciful 95 minutes — it has, like all the best horror outings, something utterly human to leave you with after the lights come up and the demon is put back in his box.