A Quiet Place, directed by and starring John Krasinski, is not a silent movie, but it is a movie that revolves around silence. It made me think about what sound gives to a movie, and what it takes away. Krasinski’s co-writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who originated the idea, say that they watched a lot of silent films in college, but their excellent horror film made me ponder silent film presentation rather than production. In fact, I kept thinking about a recent, controversial score for a 1920s movie, and what the purpose of music and sound is in a film.

Hitchcock said that one mark of a good film is that you can follow it with the sound turned off, and that is certainly true of A Quiet Place. Our heroes are a family of five, led by Krasinski and his real-wife wife Emily Blunt. Their daughter is played by Millicent Simmonds, the young deaf actress who is every bit as remarkable here as she was in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, and her little brother is played by Noah Jupe, whom you may have seen in The Night Manager or Suburbicon. The premise, as with the best horror movies, is both simple and devastating. New York State has been left desolate after an influx of seemingly indestructible monsters. They’re blind, but highly sensitive to sound, so staying silent is the only way to stay alive.

The opening sequence, in which the family raid a deserted drugstore for supplies, illustrates their survival strategy. The cast go barefoot, move slowly and deliberately, and communicate only via sign language (subtitled for those viewers who don’t read it). There are just two intertitles, counting the days since the invasion. Because the scenario unfolds so neatly with so little spoken or audible dialogue, much has been made of the film’s clever visual exposition, though that may be laying it on a bit thick. There’s a whiteboard back at the family’s base camp with helpful notes writ large, and a selection of carefully curated headlines from the New York Post pinned up alongside it. Continue reading A Quiet Place (2018): the horror of silence →