Well-made but ultimately an implausible and weakly-plotted horror film

Rating: 6/10 (25 January 2019)

A family tries to survive on an Earth (apparently) overrun with sightless creatures that hunt by sound, from which the only protection is silence. The film is very well-done and the permeating quietness is striking. The cast is excellent in what must have been very challenging roles (as much needed to be expressed through 'body language' and gesture). Unfortunately, the film's lack of exposition leads to many unanswered questions and potential plot holes. As the family is hundreds of days in isolation, presumably the film takes place in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by the creatures, but other than hints in vague newspaper clippings, this unlikely scenario is never addressed. While we're told the creatures are 'armoured' (and so presumably invulnerable to the family's shotgun), unless their hide is made of unobtainium or some kind of supernatural material, the idea that they, however fast and fierce, could stand up to military weaponry is ridiculous. They are blindly (sorry, couldn't resist) attracted to sound and are repeatedly shown opening their armour to expose their hearing apparatus when near potential prey, so presumably they would be easy to lure into traps and killed (or at least deafened). Another obvious question pertains to the monster's response to ambient sound. The scene at the river shows that being surrounded by noise is protective so why not surround the farm with wind chimes etc. to mask sounds and then put similar noisemakers elsewhere as distractions (the argument that all of this would be too noisy to set up ignores that fact that Abbot (John Krasinski) was able to string up hundreds of warning lights). A good story/script would have addressed these kinds of concerns (as well as the numerous others brought up by other commentators). 'Tremors' (1998) makes a good counter-example: once the basic premise (admittedly far-fetched) was accepted, the rest of the story was internally consistent and, within context, believable. An alternative approach was taken by 'Bird Box' (2018), a similar 'sensory-deprivation' horror yarn, in which the threat was supernatural and thus, by definition, free of logical constraints (although a little more exposition and internal consistency would have helped that film as well). "A Quiet Place" is an example of a film in which the execution was better than the material, which seems to becoming more and more common as (IMO) films in this genre continue to focus on imagery and 'mood' at the expensive of narrative.