An intense viewing experience with room for improvement

Rating: 7/10 (2 June 2018)

When I saw the 8/10 IMDb rating A Quiet Place had, I had high hopes. However, when I began reading reviews I saw that the reviews didn't necessarily correlate to the rating and my hopes were dashed. I should have learned by now not to base my entire judgement of a movie based on ratings/reviews alone.
A Quiet Place is not quite at the 8/10 rating it has, but likewise is not as awful as the critics suggest. Unlike many other horror/post-apocalyptic movies I've seen in the past (and I've seen A LOT), it's engaging and managed to keep the attention of my mom, stepdad and myself (which is saying a lot, since they're both the kind of people that will turn a movie off after 5 minutes if they feel nothing interesting is happening/developing).
There are a lot of positives to this movie, the first being the cast. It's very difficult to deliver a strong performance in this kind of movie but even more so when dialogue is so limited and everything is in the body language/expressions and non-audible communication. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski as the mother and father were particularly great, but the child actors delivered brilliant performances also.
In addition to the strong cast, the movie is well-paced and surprisingly unpredictable. Usually when I go into movies like this I feel I can predict exactly what is going to happen within the opening scenes, but that wasn't the case with A Quiet Place. The opening scene immediately sets the scene and is powerful in displaying how high the stakes are. Despite the movie following the same family all the way through there's a sense that none of them are safe, not even the children. That alone was enough to keep me on the edge of my seat.
Despite this, A Quiet Place is far from perfect and there's A LOT of room for improvement. The biggest flaw in this movie are the huge lapses in logic and lack of consistency regarding the creatures. It's established from the out-set that they hunt by sound, yet there seems to be all kind of ambiguity surrounding that definition. There are scenes where the family are clearly making noise that would be detectable by the creatures, yet they go unnoticed. Likewise, on the occasions where they do make noise conveniently, only one creature turns up at a time. Where are the rest of them? Why is there only ever one creature within distance of hearing the noise at any given time? Furthermore, many animals that hunt by sound are able to detect sounds as minimal as the heartbeat, yet these creatures are unable to. I could continue with these lapses in logic all day, but other reviewers have already pointed them out and the point is that the movie would have benefited if it had been more consistent in its characterisation of the creatures.
When it comes to the character's decisions, they were very questionable and failed to do some of the most basic, obvious things you'd do when trying to survive in a world dominated by creatures that hunt by sound. Again, I won't list all of them since I don't want to include any spoilers in this review, but for anyone that watches you'll immediately know what I mean. It does sometimes make it hard to believe that the family would actually survive, since they lack common sense in most of the life or death situations they come up against.
The final aspect that needed more detail, was the history of the post-apocalyptic world the movie was set in. Where did the creatures come from? How did they get to Earth? How many are there? What's happened to the rest of civilisation? It felt like these things needed to be explained much better, particularly since the family only encountered one other human throughout the movie, yet there didn't appear that the world was swarming with the creatures. How did the world get in such a terrible state when the supposed "disaster" doesn't even seem that disastrous? It's not like a zombie apocalypse where the explanation for why and how the world came to be that way is pretty obvious and even logical. It felt like these creatures shouldn't have become such a problem that it resulted in the near-extinction of human-kind. With the kind of scientific knowledge and technologies we have, and armies and weapons we possess, realistically, those creatures would've been wiped out (or contained, at the very least) before it could get to such a large-scale crisis.
Overall, A Quiet Place is entertaining and thrilling, though not without its faults. With a few tweaks here and there, more attention to detail and more logic applied, it could have been a truly fantastic movie. Regardless of its flaws, I would recommend this movie to anyone that's a fan of the horror genre.