"Stay silent, stay alive!"

Rating: 8/10 (7 April 2018)

"A Quiet Place" (2018 release; 90 min.) brings the story of the Abbott family. As the movie opens, we are told it's "Day 89", and the Abbotts (mom, dad, and 3 kids) are quietly looking for useful things in an abandoned store in an abandoned village. They communicate through sign language. When the youngest, a small boy maybe 4-5, wants to take a toy, dad says no, because it might make too much noise (which apparently sets in motion unspeakable things). But behind dad's back, his older sister gives him the toy anyway. On their way home through the woods, the little boy starts playing with the toy, to the horror of mom and dad, but before dad can do anything, the little boy is snatched up by a large alien creature. At this point we are 5 minutes into the movie, but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.
Couple of comments: this is the second movie directed by actor John Krasinski, and what an outstanding effort this is. Krasinksi himself plays the role of dad, and Emily Blunt (Krasinski's wife in the real world) is mom. we find out in the movie that the story is set in 2020, but we are never told what exactly happened to the world as we know it, or how these creatures got here. All we need to know is: they are here and if you make a sound, you'll probably get hunted down. But for a few sentences spoken midway in the movie, there is no spoken dialogue whatsoever. This makes for a very interesting movie experience. Sure, we've seen dialogue-free movies in recent years (All Is Lost, and The Red Turtle come to mind), but this is in a horror movie setting. It took the theater audience a while to settle down (way too much crowd noise in the beginning for my liking), but about midway through, you could hear a pin drop in the theater. Why? The movie makers were clever enough to develop these characters in a way that you end up caring about them and feeling emotionally invested in the movie. You are rooting for the Abbotts to make it through! Because there is no dialogue, the orchestral score by composer Marco Beltrami plays a disproportionate role in the movie (almost like a character itself), and I will seek that out as well.
"A Quite Place" premiered last month at the SXSW Festival, to immediate critical acclaim. The buzz around the movie has been building ever since. It opened wide this weekend, and I couldn't wait to see it. The Friday evening screening where I saw this at here in Cincinnati was pretty much a sell-out. As mentioned before, the crowd really got into it, and in particular as to being quiet along with the quiet moments in the movie (of which there are a number). Bottom line: "A Quiet Place" is the latest original/clever horror film, and I encourage you to see it out, be it in the theater, on VOD, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray. "A Quiet Place" is a WINNER.