Krasinski’s ‘Place’ silent but deadly
John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place,” a Michael Bay-produced sci-fi-horror hybrid with a lot in common with M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 hit “Signs,” comes out of the SXSW Festival with a lot of buzz. But keep the noise down, dudes. You don’t want to attract the whatchamacallits.
The film begins in some terrible near future 472 days after the appearance of horrible beings resembling down-scaled versions of that “Cloverfield” monster. The clicking, growling, hissing creatures are blind, and for reasons never explained to us they hunt humans by sound and have killed most of us (to what purpose?).
Among the seemingly few survivors are the Abbotts. Lee (full beardo Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s wife) are the attractive young parents. Their children are tweener Regan (Millicent Simmonds, “Wonderstruck”) and boys Beau (Cade Woodard) and Marcus (Noah Jupe). We first meet the Abbotts in a drugstore, where Regan, who wears a hearing aid that does not work, gives Beau a toy jet fighter he covets (ruh-roh). Later, on a bridge out of town, Beau fires up the noisy jet fighter and is swept away by a beast in a roaring blur never to be seen again.
My big question watching this was: Why aren’t the Abbotts armed to the teeth and blowing big holes in the whatchamacallits? Not much is explained in “A Quiet Place” and it is best if you just go along, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, I don’t like going along.
“A Quiet Place” is a movie with a gimmick. The gimmick is that it is a very quiet film with the exception of some nature sounds and flourishes from composer Marco Beltrami. The characters in the film mostly communicate using sign language with subtitles. No one speaks except for a few, very low whispers. This makes seeing it in a movie theater a bit of a bummer if you were planning to munch loudly on popcorn or are sitting near a talker.
“A Quiet Place,” which also recalls Trey Edward Shults’ more original 2017 effort “It Comes at Night,” is designed to make impressionable viewers leap in their seats, using the tried and true “something jumps in front of the camera” trick. It never gets old, I guess, if you’re a 2-year-old.
Krasinski (“Promised Land”) and co-writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (“Nightlight”) depict Lee and Evelyn as almost perfect parents. I preferred Mel Gibson’s nutcase exreverend in “Signs” to these bland people, tell you the truth. I also kept wondering why the Abbotts hadn’t seen “The Walking Dead” and learned a few lessons from it.
After returning to the farm they have tricked out with electricity (?), water, a cornfield, a basement bunker, enough pickled vegetables to get through a few winters and a single solitary shotgun, audio tinkerer Lee gives Regan a hearing aid he has tried to repair. Regan is tormented by guilt because of Beau’s death. Evelyn, who gets to appear in a signature moment from “Alien” with one of the whatchamacallits, finds out she is pregnant.
The plot swells along with Evelyn. Silent birth, anyone? At one point, Lee offers to take a justifiably terrified Marcus into the woods to learn survival techniques. The kid does not want to go. He is the only one in the movie with any sense. Shh.