Monsters Unleashed: A Quiet Place

You’ve finally made it out to the movies, eager to see what everyone’s talking about. The concession stand has already been hit; you’ve got your standard bag of Sour Patch and a bucket of popcorn that’s absolutely slathered in butter. When you finally take your seat, there’s a shuffle of getting comfortable—one of your friends runs to the bathroom really quick. Another checks Instagram one last time. You crunch away at your popcorn, thankful that this theater finally upgraded to those extra comfy recliners.

The movie starts and you’ve already heard about the premise, so the silence doesn’t surprise you, but even so you still feel a bit unsettled. An on-screen family you don’t much care about spends time silently looting a drugstore, sign language flying, steps carefully. You can see the story foreshadow a terrible end in the form of a little light up rocketship, and the tension grows at the center of your chest. As anxious parents quiet their restless children, so too do they quiet you.

You see it first, and the dread fills you. Then the little light up rocket is the very first sound you’ve heard since the previews and it pierces the room. You hope beyond hope that John Krasinski can run fast enough, because immediately, without your knowledge, you’ve come to care about these characters, but of course he can’t. They never can. The youngest of your group of adventurers is ripped away from his family, dead in an instant.

In the abundance of silence that follows, your popcorn suddenly feels like lead in your lap. You’re pinned to your pleather seat, threatened by the potential squeak of a movement. Your very breath has softened, for fear that if you are the next to make a sound, the monsters might hear you, too.

The summer of 2018 brought with it a number of truly groundbreaking movies, but when it comes to technique and execution, one soars miles above the rest. A Quiet Place set a new standard for immersive storytelling, instilling true anxiety in a way that affected its audience’s actions. So often, silence is edited out of films as much as it possibly can be for fear that it might cause a viewer to lose interest. That it might take away from those action sequences that are meant to hold your attention. A Quiet Place took a feared sound element and turned it into a tool for tension.

This isn’t the first time silence has been used to great effect (2013’s Gravity comes to mind), nor is the horror genre a complete stranger to the concept. Think of, as an example, all of the world’s jump scares that you’ve seen coming. All of the strange old ghosts in movies who never once said a word. Silence has long been used as a way to build tension, but it typically only lasts a few seconds. It’s usually undercut by plot dialogue as a means to give the audience a break. That up and down roller coaster of tension and ease is the reason people spend ten dollars to see a horror movie.

A Quiet Place doesn’t give viewers many breaks. For the most part, it is 90 minutes of straight tension, building and building and building, with so little release. This tension is what makes A Quiet Place feel like one of the scariest movies in modern memory (with no small amount of credit due to the tension-building master of this movie: a single nail sticking out of the floorboard that has a surprising return on narrative investment).

However, the manipulation of tension—while it does play a large role in this film’s success—is just one of many absolutely stunning elements of this movie. The production design and the way the set plays into world building is next level. The acting, especially from the younger cast members, contributes heavily to the overall immersion of the film.

Most importantly, this movie has meat on its bones. A Quiet Place is trying to scare you, and that’s no secret, but that isn’t its main goal. This movie portrays a narrative that explores human motivations and proclaims, without hesitation, that we are motivated by love. Copious, dangerous amounts of love. It’s a tale of human ingenuity and survival, yes.  But survival in the name of others, not just self preservation.