Great premise wasted.

Rating: 5/10 (6 April 2018)

A Quiet Place (2018)
Directed by John Krasinski
4/10
Having a great and original concept can be a film's saving grace, enabling audiences to forgive glaring weaknesses and flaws across the board, as the freshness of what they're seeing is too distinct to be dragged down by some of the problems the film may actually have; but sometimes, that concept can be frustrating in it's greatness, as the execution is simply impossible forgive, making the film inconsistent and 'cinemanarritively dissonant', and unfortunately, this was the case with John Krasinski's "A Quiet Place".
There were really great things about "A Quiet Place" outside of the concept alone, like the acting, the pacing, and some of the attention to detail, and an example of this, would be the film cutting out every bit of the ambient sound when the camera cut to a close up of the deaf daughter (played by the talented Millicent Simmonds), creating the type of subjectivity that can immerse the audience in whatever she was experiencing in that specific scene. The cinematography, though not lit in a way that gave it a distinct look, was competently executed, and didn't go the horrible Paul Greengrass way and shake uncontrollably in every scene, which is all too common in the modern horror genre. Though I already mentioned the acting, Emily deserves her own praise, because she was levels above every one else in this film, delivering a powerhouse performance, with little to no dialogue, further cementing her place among the best actors in Hollywood today.
Now, with a concept that doesn't allow the characters to make noise, you would think the story would generate the type of interest that would keep the audience on the edge of their seats, with moments of unrelenting tension gripping them from scene to scene, but unfortunately, that was not the case. The "no sound" element of the story proved to be nothing more than an excuse to implement the cheapest scare tactic in all of horror....the 'jump scare'. In literally every moment of on screen terror, Krasinski never missed an opportunity to raise the volume of a random noise, that otherwise wouldn't exist in the film's reality, to 1,000, in an effort to startle the audience, and break the tension. This particular technique actually worked against the film's ability to genuinely create a sense of 'oneness' the audience could feel with the characters on screen, because in every moment in which the sound is dropped out, rather than feel the dread of the characters in that moment, we're anticipating the loud noise around the corner, placing our minds firmly on the filmmakers themselves, completely shattering the cinematic illusion.
I think it's okay for a film to be limited on expository dialogue, and just tell it's story, in fact, I encourage that approach; however, if the film's story is relying on us buying into the it's internal logic without adhering to it's own rules (established in the first five minutes of the film), it's hard to set aside the questions we have and simply enjoy the movie. Questions like, what are the creatures there for? What do they want? Why do they kill? How do the characters use the bathroom? What keeps drawing the creatures to convenient places during the film's action climax, other than the screenwriter's need for a scene? Are babies quiet enough to live and thrive in this world? Ect. Ect. are distracting, and ultimately took away from my ability to simply sit, watch, and get invested in "A Quiet Place".
Overall, I didn't absolutely hate this film, but the inability to stick to the rules that it established early on, and the awful jump scares throughout were some of the many flaws that took away from my ability to truly enjoy it, and that's a shame because this is an original film with a fantastic concept, and I want to see more like it.