Plus the weekend’s best films
Tim Robey FILM CRITIC
A Quiet Place
15 cert, 90 min John Krasinski
Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward
‘In space, no one can hear you scream” went the tag line for Alien. In John Krasinski’s clammy-palmed survival horror A Quiet Place, screaming is a lot worse than fruitless – it would instantly be the end of you. The slightest sound, in the film’s post-apocalyptic vision of a human race in hiding, will send a scavenging alien straight to your door.
These creatures, which we glimpse only in alarming flashes for the first hour of screen time, have no other senses at their disposal – you could shine a floodlight into their faces, puff cigar smoke into their toothy maws, and no harm would arise. Drop a pill bottle, though, and they’ll tear you to shreds.
In practice, as the Abbott family perform a daily dumb show to remain intact, this means a lot of sign language. Headed by Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real-life wife) the Abbotts have got this down to a particularly fine art.
Because their eldest child, played by Wonderstruck’s deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, has always had no hearing, it’s implied that, in the years since the invasion, they may have enjoyed a kind of evolutionary advantage in outwitting their predators. Most of American society, on the other hand, has been too helplessly loud, too incapable of shutting up, to find safety.
The Abbotts have built a farm hideout – less American Gothic, more Edward Hopper – in some wooded corner of the Hudson Valley, near a corn silo. Their survival systems are complex – there’s an elaborate set of warning beacons rigged up outside. They pad around barefoot, and food, none of it crunchy, is eaten without plates or glassware, but hand to mouth. In the basement, forbidden to the children, Lee tries to make radio contact on foreign frequencies, and also experiments on new hearing aids for his daughter.
Evelyn is also pregnant and the advent of a squalling child is obviously going to pose some extra challenges. Without giving anything away, the timing and circumstances of her labour – in a bath, under threat – are about the worst a film character has ever had to endure. Blunt rises to the occasion with a performance that’s almost exhaustingly credible, as Evelyn devotes every ounce of energy into stifling her agony, buying herself more time. An exposed nail on the basement steps, thus far unnoticed, is a potentially deadly obstacle.
Krasinski has directed two littleseen indies before, but with this film he’s struck gold in terms of premise, stakes and execution. It’s such a great, simple idea – redolent of 2000’s Vin Diesel thriller Pitch Black, where the problem was light, rather than sound – but richly explored. We get to know what level of whispering the family can get away with, when a knockedover lantern spells disaster, and why yelling under a waterfall is OK.
Simmonds, once again, is very compelling. Krasinski shows great nous in including this deaf character, who is missing out on rather little in the circumstances, except being the only one forced to rely on others’ reactions when the monsters draw close. Noah Jupe – as her younger brother Marcus – is a child actor so quick and expressive that his terrorstricken apology, when he causes a sound, inspires protective feelings in an audience.
The story is engineered with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punch line that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying. The emotional heft that Krasinski is after is narrowly missed, too – there’s a waft of Hollywood cheese in certain decisions that brings it down to earth with a light bump.
Nothing’s derailed, thankfully: it’s a mercilessly effective game of hide and seek, tiptoeing around its welldesigned habitat with real ingenuity, and the Abbotts, warmly conceived, are troupers to the last.