Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: More than a year ago, alien creatures crashed to Earth in meteors and wiped out nearly the entire human race. Since then, the Abbott family — the pregnant Evelyn (Emily Blunt), her husband Lee (John Krasinski), their daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) who is deaf, and their frightened son Marcus (Noah Jupe) — must survive this destroyed world in near total silence, for the creatures hunt by sound. The family has made their space at a farm to live and hide from the creatures, but of course, something goes wrong. Thus the Abbotts must survive the ultimate nightmare while trying to untangle the family drama that they’ve swept under the rug for so long.

Review: A Quiet Place is one of those movies that I predict will be taught at film schools, particularly concerning its masterful use of sound. The movie spun a world where one stray snap, crackle, or pop can spell doom for people, so every instance of sound has an incredible impact on the audience. I’ve heard tell that some audiences were so engrossed in the film that they were afraid to chew their popcorn. When that level of immersion is created, you know you’re sitting on something golden.

The acting is superb as well; John Krasinski not only stars, but directs as well and it’s impressive that he got everyone to put such emotion into mostly nonverbal communication. Oh, did I forget to mention that this is a subtitled movie where the characters talk through sign language? Yeah, kinda flies in the face of people saying that subtitled movies don’t do well, huh? Even looking past the acting, the use of subtitles is well implemented, such as separately putting out individual words of a line for emphasis when the time calls for it. I suppose that makes it a literary masterpiece as well as a cinematic one.

I also love the creatures’ designs, as they truly look like nightmares come to life. From their stake-like arms and their pale, almost sickly color pallets, they look like something straight out of Dead Space. On top of that, they’re very well-designed with their heads being able to segment and shift to better focus on sound while the fleshy bits underneath look like giant ear canals. Massive props for originality there, movie.

This is definitely an edge-of-your-seat thriller and has one of the most perfect endings I’ve ever seen, cutting off at just the right moment. There’s enough in the background to let you put together what happened before the movie started (very Mad Max: Fury Road in that respect) and plenty of details in the surroundings that help you figure out what’s going on in the here and now. It’s almost like movies are supposed to… all together now, class… SHOW, DON’T TELL. Everyone needs to see this movie to enrich their lives and Hollywood needs to get the message that we need more movies doing this kind of masterful visual storytelling.

Fun Tidbit #1: You think this movie is sparse on spoken word? In the original script by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, there was only one line of spoken word. Said screenplay, by the way, was named one of the ten best on the industry professional Tracking Board’s 2017 Hit List.

Fun Tidbit #2: So in addition to being the director, star, and real-life husband to his on-screen wife, he also did the motion capture for a creature in a few scenes. Talk about talent.