A Quiet Place Review

This past weekend wasn't a very quiet one at the box office as "A Quiet Place" stormed in at $50.2 million. That's one of the best opening weekends ever for a horror film. The specific ranking might depend on what counts as a horror film as it's behind movies like "Van Helsing" ($51.7 million), "The Village" ($50.7) and "Hannibal" ($58.0 million), if those count as horror, but in terms of traditional horror, it's behind last year's phenom "IT" ($123.4 million) and narrowly behind "Paranormal Activity 3" ($52.6 million), but ahead of pretty much everything else, including all movies in "The Conjuring" franchise, "Insidious" franchise, everything else in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise and lots more. I don't normally just spout of numbers in my reviews themselves, but I wanted to point this out to let you know the gravity of how big this movie's opening weekend was. Usually if a horror film opens in the $20-30 million range, that's considered good, especially since these movies are pretty cheap to make. Just last weekend in my April movie preview, I threw out "Annabelle: Creation" ($35.0 million) and "Don't Breathe" ($26.4 million) as potential comparisons, and that's after knowing what it made Thursday night. So this opening is absolutely insane.

What this really speaks to in my mind is that people going out to see movies in the theaters isn't dying out. If you make a quality movie and put together a good marketing effort, people are still willing to make the trip to the theaters. And this is a movie that had a ton of momentum ever since the initial trailer dropped, which makes me happy because at first I was wondering if I was the only one excited for this when that trailer first came out. There's quite a few good, unique horror films that end up getting ignored by general audiences and I was ready to begin the fight to convince people to give this one a chance, like I have in the past with movies such as "The Witch," "The Babadook," "It Follows" or "It Comes at Night," but it makes me really happy inside that this is not a battle that I have to even start this time around. In fact, it's been quite the opposite. People have come to me in the last few days asking if I've seen the movie or telling me that they're excited to read my review. I even had to get a ticket later than I was planning on Saturday night because the initial showing I tried to buy a ticket for was sold out. And I totally didn't expect this to be a movie that would sell out. All this has been surprising for me, but this is a really fun movie that deserves the attention.

If you are one of the few people that are a fan of horror and haven't seen this movie yet, well, I'd recommend that you actually close this review and just go see it. I'm not going to spoil anything here, but I am going to talk about what this movie is and why I really enjoyed it. Given that I didn't know much about the premise outside the fact that our main characters had to be perfectly silent or else they were going to be in a lot of trouble, I also want to give you the opportunity to go in with a completely blank slate, because I think that enhances the experience in a film like this. Having seen the movie, I will say that I feel comfortable talking about the premise of the movie because John Krasinski did not make a mystery box horror film. It's not one of those situations where there's something out there and neither the characters nor the audience know what it is until the last half of the movie. Instead, we know rather early on exactly what the danger is. If you're still reading, this is your last chance to turn away because what we are dealing with here is a... monster movie. We don't know where they came from or much about anything how this all started, but John Krasinski's whiteboard and newspaper clippings early on reveal everything that he's learned about them.

I've got to say, in terms of the idea behind these creatures, this was a rather clever way of adding some spice into a genre that has been worn out quite a bit over the last few decades. Whether it's a monster, an alien, a dinosaur or a supernatural demon, a horror movie involving our main characters running away from some sort of scary thing is something we've seen quite a bit, so you have to do more than just give me a movie about a monster terrorizing the community to get me excited, thus is why, for a brief few minutes at the beginning, I was a bit let down that this is all this was. Just another monster movie. But that feeling went away rather quickly as we progressed because these monsters are rather creatively designed and written. While we've seen plenty of these types of movies before, this felt fresh because these monsters are completely blind, extremely fast and will almost instantly kill anyone who makes a sound. That's different. Different enough to get me on board with these creatures, anyways. We do see glimpses of them very early on, which made me immediately a bit terrified because these are scary looking things. Then when we see them close up, it gets even worse because this has to be one of the best creature designs since the Xenomorphs in "Alien."

What's even better than the creature design itself is the way this movie is set up. The idea here is that the characters in the movie have to be very quiet as any loud sound will cause these things to jump out at them, regardless of whether it's midday or in the middle of the night. Because of that, the movie itself is really silent for much of it, which in turn forces the audience to remain frozen in their seats. This was one of the quietest movie-going experiences ever for me because no one dared make a single sound. Thus if anyone coughed, walked down the isle, moved around in their chair or even made too much noise with their popcorn or candy, everyone in the theater would hear that as if it were happening right next to them. Normally small sounds like that aren't a big deal, but when the movie itself is so silent and the whole theater is invested in being perfectly still, those sounds are a big deal and no one wants to be the one to make one of those sounds, making the theater-going experience rather exciting. The best comparison I can come up with is listening to a performance of John Cage's 4'33." If you understand that reference, then we can be friends and you'll know exactly what this movie-going experience will be like. If not, then do a quick Google search.

The basic idea there with John Cage's song is that everything is completely silent. The whole orchestra follows along, the conductor still turns his pages and everyone involved in the performance takes this seriously, but no one has any notes. But there's still music being played. How? Well, John Cage was a very experimental musician and the idea here is that this gives you the opportunity to pay close attention to all the little sounds around you and have that be the music. Yes, there's humor if you're in on it in seeing the initial reaction from those who have never experienced this and are thus really confused as to why no music is being played, but there's also a lot of honest pleasure in taking the time during those four minutes to listen to all of those small noises happening around you that you would normally not pay attention to otherwise, thus making it a beautiful piece of music. That's what it felt like watching "A Quiet Place." It made me pay attention to the sound design in the movie. Sure, there was no score or no dialogue in much of the scenes, but there was a lot of effort put into the sound editing and sound mixing to portray the natural sounds of the world around them and I enjoyed paying close attention to that, both in the movie and in the theater around me.

Thus I went into the movie expecting some really good scares, but I quickly found that the movie was really beautiful. I was fully invested in paying attention to all the small things happening and the movie took a lot of time building these characters so that you actually care about every member of this family. I would say that perhaps the first third or first quarter of this movie wasn't scary at all and I appreciated that because the best horror films aren't the ones with the most scares or the most gruesome monster designs, but rather the best horror films are the ones that make you care about all of your characters and have the best story or themes. Thus when the scares do come, you are even more emotionally invested because you care about all of your characters and you want them to make it out safely. Monster movies like "Jurassic Park" or "Jaws" are extremely effective because there was so much care in the world-building of the movie as well as the character arcs that when the dinosaurs or the shark show up, things get really intense because the audience actually cares. It's not the dinosaurs or the shark that make those movies good. I mean, both movies got a bunch of sequels, yet none of the sequels were able to recapture the magic of the original despite the monster terror.

All of this makes John Krasinski's work in "A Quiet Place" really impressive, especially since he's mostly just a comedic actor with little directing experience, but you wouldn't know that by watching this film as this feels like it comes from someone with years of directing experience. He's said in interviews that he didn't even make this movie for the scares. He made this movie as a love letter to his kids with the idea of presenting a movie showing what he as a parent would do to protect his kids if they were put in some sort of danger like this. Thus in doing so he was able to craft a truly effective horror film. When the danger finally comes, the movie is relentless with its terror. Speaking of "Jurassic Park," most of this movie is like that scene with the velociraptors in the kitchen, but spread out through much of the run time. The movie lets you know when it's OK to relax for a moment, but then quickly reminds you of how dangerous of a situation this family is in so that you can't relax too much. For a majority of this movie, you are left cowering in your chair in complete silent terror. There's also a lot of foreshadowing in the movie as the audience is clued in on several things long before the characters themselves are, giving the audience a complete sense of dread for the future.

The only real complaint that I have about this movie is not really much of a complaint at all, but is rather more of a statement about what type of movie this is. This is not a horror film like "The Witch" or "The Babadook" that will stick with me long after I leave the theater. Both of those movies, as well as others like them, are movies with deep, thought-provoking themes that left me lost in thought right after my first viewing that gave me a desire to go back time and time again in order to explore those themes even more. I didn't have that feeling with "A Quiet Place." Rather, as I was walking to my car, instead of being lost in thought, it was like I just got off an intense rollercoaster ride that gave me quite the thrill, but after being finished my mind was ready to move onto the next ride. That's not to say there's no strong themes worth discussing because there certainly are. However, I'm not going to discuss them here because that would require me talking about spoilers. If you've seen the movie, you'll know exactly what moments I'm talking about. But for the most part, this is not some deep exploration of a certain subject matter, but is a simple, fun thrill ride well worth seeing if you haven't already. And that's perfectly OK. I'm going to award "A Quiet Place" a 9/10.