Scream quietly, or else
A Quiet Place (M)
90 mins ★★★★ 1⁄2
John Krasinski’s classy, gorgeous, nearsilent film A Quiet Place had me all but squirming onto the floor, alternately grabbing the arm rests, my neighbour and at one skin-crawling point, my own head. A Quiet Place isa masterclass in relentless tension that ramps up from the get-go and keeps on going.
It’s day 38 of whatever apocalyptic nightmare has befallen humanity and one family is foraging silently in what’s left of the supermarket. The shelves are mostly bare but for a scattering of crushed, overturned packages and empty bottles.
A host of post-apocalyptic nightmares haunt our screens these days, but this one is different – it is utterly quiet. Bare-footed children wander between the boxes and overturned shopping carts. There’s a trail of noise cancelling sand up to the supermarket door. They use sign language.
It’s a scene so surreal and novel your attention is captured immediately. When one of kids climbs on the shelving to reach a plastic toy, it tips and falls. An adult scrambles to catch the toy before it hits the ground.
We don’t have to wait long to find out why the prospect of noise is so terrifying in A Quiet Place and I’m not overstating it to say the reveal is incredibly brave in these squeamish times. It will shock you to the core without showing you so much as a splatter of blood. Pure visual storytelling class.
I am being deliberately vague because you should go into this film knowing as little as possible.
What I can tell you is that Krasinski, doing double time here as the head of the silent family and the film’s director, has never been more likeable as the earnest, troubled man trying to keep his family alive – and sane – under impossible circumstances. Emily Blunt is similarly engaging as the resourceful, powerful, compassionate mum.
The kids deserve the biggest accolades. Millicent Simmonds as their daughter, a young woman straining at the bonds of her own disability (she’s deaf and the family communicate using American Sign Language) and the restrictions placed on them by the hellish environment they live in, is perfect. Playing her fragile younger brother, Noah Jupe delivers as nuanced and mature a performance as either of his adult co-stars.
There are only a few niggles: some heavy-handed visual exposition, and a resolution that owes a little bit too much, perhaps, to M Night Shyamalan’s Signs.
But there’s no way that detracts from the overall sonic boom A Quiet Place delivers. – Kylie Klein Nixon