A Quiet Place Review: A Moving Horror About Silence

A Quiet Place has a simple but nifty set-up that leads to creative storytelling. The plot raises the stakes early on in the movie and the audience is immediately pulled into the reality of its characters – a family thrives in silence, but it’s merely a false sense of security in a life that’s a single sound away from death.

The combination of sound design and imagery provides a number of nerve-rattling moments. Sound editors created different sonic points of view that enable the audience to experience what the characters and the creature hears. First-time director John Krasinski is able to bring this all together to create breathtaking sequences, so while a character running through a cornfield is a horror staple, it’s still scary in A Quiet Place.

The cast delivers great performances that when the movie uses its premise as an allegory for our failure to communicate, the plot delivers an emotional punch in one pivotal moment. This is a movie that not only uses its greatest assets to scare you but also shows how it psychologically affects its characters.

A Quiet Place still marches to the beat of a straightforward crowd-pleasing horror and suffers from the same telegraphed scares and questionable movie logic that plague this genre. There’s definitely a much creepier movie here that could do away with the musical score.

Still, A Quiet Place is filled with enough creativity to make it stand on its own. Moreover, it’s not just about a family of four trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s also about the sacrifices we need to make and the words that shouldn’t be left unsaid.