Monster film with a people focus

Rating: 7/10 (2 June 2018)

A Quiet Place is a good film, far better than most monster films. It actually deserves to be called a "Monster film" instead of a "Monster flick."
The reasons are pretty simple: The writers (Woods and Beck) actually made sure that the characters are carefully introduced, that we get to know the interpersonal dynamics of the family from the get-go, as parents and children hide quietly from blind monsters that use echolocation and sound to home in on prey. Director John Krasinsky paces the plot well, and makes the most of excellent acting by Emily Blunt as the mother, himself as dad, and Millicent Simmonds as the headstrong daughter. The musical score is simple and menacing, which fits a film with little talk better than the usual symphonic scoring. And for the most part the plot is fairly plausible. This places the film at par with other good horror thrillers, such as Final Destination (in which people escape a plane crash, only for death to reckon with them via bizarre lethal accidents), or Nightmare on Elm Street (in which victims are stalked in their dreams and die in their sleep).
Too bad A Quiet Place can't quite make it to "8", where Hitchcock Thrillers reside because of their airtight plots. Here we do have creatures that one minute can burst through a thick-gauge steel grain silo, but the next minute can't punch through the cabin of a pick-up truck. A creature that pauses conveniently to allow dad and daughter to say good-bye via a lengthy sign language conversation before dad sacrifices himself. And as a scientist, I have to say the first thing I would think when confronted with blind critters that use sound to 'see,' is: "Hmm, if bright light confuses people who see, maybe shrill sounds will get these critter's defenses down." So if mom can kill one easily with a shotgun at the end of the movie while daughter emits a shrill sound, I think engineers and scientists of the industrio-military complexes of the world would have figured this one out within a few hours. So the 100s-of-days-postapocalypse, no-radio-stations-in-the-world-answer-anymore scenario does not make much sense.
In the typical turn-about fashionable right now, for which 2015-2025 films will undoubtedly be stereotyped 30 years from now, the boy is scared and the girl is strong and resourceful, while dad can't do better than kill himself and mom is a superhuman who won't make a sound stepping on a nail while giving birth. Still, the film presents the characters in much detail to make this all seem right, which is more than one can say of other recent movies that take sweet revenge for decades of oppression of women in the movie industry.
A 7/10 good enough to see again, even when the suspense is a bit less once we know where it leads.