5 Reasons Why I Love A Quiet Place
Having just seen that the trailer for A Quiet Place Part II has been released, I thought it the perfect time to finally watch the first film, and to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed would be a massive understatement. I don’t believe I’ve seen a single thing that John Krasinksi has been in since The Office and while I’ve heard he’s very good in Jack Ryan, I’m just not ready to accept him as an action star. Emily Blunt, on the other hand, can be in as many movies as she wants and I may just see them all.
So it’s only been the better part of 2 years that I’ve waited to watch A Quiet Place but it has worked to my advantage. Not only did I get to stream it from the comfort of my home with a tasty beverage in my hand, but I also don’t have to wait long for the sequel. As far as my thoughts on the film (I think the cat’s already out of the bag on this one), I figured I’d do something a little different than just the average movie review. Here are 5 reasons I loved A Quiet Place.
The little things. World building doesn’t have to take a trilogy, a text crawl, a 3 minute narration, or 40 minutes of explaining. Sometimes you just need to be thrown into the environment and filled in on the go. The pieces are all there. The radio reports, the newspaper clippings. Hell, we’ve seen so many movies like this that you can pretty much infer that it was either some alien invasion, a zombie outbreak, or a massive monster that laid waste to civilization. What this movie does right is get the small details right that fill in that narrative for us. The sand they walk on, the Morse code, and the sheer terror on the faces of the actors whenever there is the slightest sound tells me all I need to know about the delicacy of their situation.
The cast. Speaking of the cast, putting Emily Blunt and Krasinski together as husband and wife works so well that it’s a shame (SPOILER ALERT!) that John had to die in this one. My guess from watching the trailer for the second film is that we’ll at least get a scene or two that pieces some of the origin together. While I don’t think that’s necessary, I won’t argue with getting a little more information on just what the hell caused all of this to happen. The children are also great for a movie like this. There is obviously no reason to assume they are going to survive since we’ve already seen one of them get killed and that heightens the tension even more for me.
Don’t just tell me. Show me. This is something I’ve already mentioned but so few movies do this nowadays that it bears repeating how much I enjoyed going on this journey with A Quiet Place. Give me 110-120 minutes of this in the second film and I’ll just be a happy little boy. I’m a grown man and I don’t need some moronic director or screenwriter to tell me what is happening on screen. Let me watch the film and come to my own conclusions. Too many big films treat their audiences like they don’t have the imagination or attention spans to follow a well-told story.
World building when there is no world. This film had an opportunity to be a part of the Cloverfield franchise and while I really enjoy what they’ve done with that universe, I’m thrilled that A Quiet Place has gone out on its own. It doesn’t have to worry about any baggage that connecting it to that franchise would have brought on and it’s free of any preconceived notions about where it might be going and just how many there might be. Wouldn’t it be great for a film to just end and not wonder if there is going to be another? A Quiet Place builds its own world and it does it with only about 6 actors, hardly any spoken dialogue, and a metric shit-ton of balls to kill of its main character. Show me another film that is willing to do even two of those things?
Tension, tension, and more tension. I’ve always thought that Korean cinema was the best at building tension on screen. Maybe it’s because those films don’t always follow the normal Hollywood style of film making and there is NEVER a guarantee that it will have a happy ending. By now, I’m usually waiting for the good guys to be utterly broken. But A Quiet Place builds to the crescendo (both in a story telling sense and an audible one) in a way that starts at the very first frames and slowly builds upwards until we’re no longer sure how it’s going to end. We’re caught off guard in a way that we’re left scratching our heads with a furrowed brow and whispering to ourselves, “boy…they sure are f*cked now.” And if you’re anything like me you really were whispering at the end of this movie cause you were so caught up in the film that you forgot you were actually allowed to make noise. That’s how you grab a viewer. You show them something, let them piece it together with the clues, and bask in feeling of desperation and despair you’ve caused. What a joy!
