A masterpiece of nerve shredding tension, with layers to peel back if you want to.

Rating: 9/10 (1 February 2019)

Silence is a space on to which much can be projected. Fears and hopes, understandings and misunderstandings, rejection and acceptance, comfort and discomfort. Silent prayer is a rich tradition of many different streams of spirituality; God can speak in silence (as depressed, suicidal Elijah found); equally God's silence can be a fearful thing. In A Quiet Place, silence is something to be sought at all costs; but it's also a space into which fear, guilt, intimacy and much more besides can be projected.
Humanity has been ravaged by monsters which hunt sound; noise-making is only safe in the context of a much louder noise. The film follows a two adults, three children family trying to make their way. Make a noise in the space of silence, and death is both swift and inevitable. It's a lean film - 86 minutes, a cast of 7 people, which is all the better to enable the viewer little time to mull on the central plot hole (if noise can be made next to louder noise, why not just go and live next to a damn or a waterfall?). Despite that, the film is almost unbearably tense - inevitably, large parts of it are silent. Communication is mostly unspoken, in gesture or sign language.
There's profundity in stillness and silence: a hand held silent grace before a family meal is eloquent and moving; this is a family with its own share of trauma and guilt, healing is needed and maybe shared silence will allow for a portion of that. But mostly this is a film that grips like a vice and never lets go; it's breathless, and orchestrates a series of shocks and jumps with mastery. Scenes are prefigured brilliantly, to reach pay-off at an undefined later point; in one shot, the camera pans down to show a nail protruding from a step in the family's house. Given that bare feet are compulsory in the noiseless existence, we spend the rest of the film waiting for a foot to be pierced. When we realise that the mother - played by Emily Blunt, outstanding in a film where every performance is brilliant - is pregnant, we start to wonder how she can possibly survive giving birth; and even if she should, how might a newborn stay silent?
Like Gravity - an effective but inferior film - the sound design makes the film what it is; silence, and the noise around it, makes for hard work for sound designers. They are justly rewarded with award recognitions. But what remains a mystery is why this film is so unrecognised in other categories; there are few better directed films, and Emily Blunt is remarkable. Critics, and especially awards, can often disdain genre films that evoke more visceral reactions - which, given the skill behind this film, is an insult to all concerned. It's a masterpiece of its type in miniature; a cine-literate one that references many other great thrillers (in one set piece the classic Harrison Ford thriller Witness is memorably evoked), horror films, science fiction and family dramas are all referenced.
There's metaphors and deeper themes there also, if we want to see them: themes of love, guilt, parenthood and childhood. Could the film be read as a metaphor for how to reshape family life in an era where some feel 'traditional' or 'nuclear' families are no longer the norm? However that question is answered, what we can say is this: A Quiet Place is as good a horror-thriller as you are likely to see, low on gore, high on tension, a film that totally immerses the viewer in its world of eloquent, fearful silence.