An acoustic examination

Rating: 8/10 (12 April 2018)

If planning on seeing A Quiet Place at your local movie theatre, be warned to prepare yourself for a tense, full-body acoustic assessment!
I thoroughly enjoyed this gripping horror movie. Of course, it has a few pros and cons - as most nouveau-horrors seem to - but what I deemed particularly successful for this movie, was how the audience had no choice but to mimic the deafening silence of the big screen.
A quick synopsis:
Set in 2020, most of the world's population appears to have fallen victim to an apocalyptic disaster. The disaster is the presence (the creation remains unexplained throughout the production) of futuristic monsters (sort of like a cross between an alien, a predator, a vampire and a giant arachnid) which hunt humans via an amplified sense of sound and have wiped out almost every human in sight. The story follows the journey of a family; mother (played by Emily Blunt), father (played by John Krasinski) and 3 children - who must, in almost complete silence - scavenge for food and supplies without alerting the monsters. Avoiding any huge spoilers, there are a few events throughout the movie which contribute to the plot and to the underlying epithet that sound plays a huge role in the entire cinematic experience.
For me, the pièce de résistance of this movie is that the audience finds itself transfixed by the complete silence of large parts of this movie. You can almost guarantee that nobody will be munching their popcorn, or slurping their coke - almost with a sense of fear that somehow their sound may alert the beasts! Sound plays such a huge part of this movie - the score, the significance of one of the children requiring a hearing aid, the stethoscope used on the belly of the mother and of course, the fact that any loud shrill or squeal will result almost certainly in death!
A very successful cinematic experience with excellent acting performances and many thrills and spills.