The sound of silence

Rating: 7/10 (31 January 2019)

In a post-apocalyptic world, a family find themselves being forced to live in silence and go into hiding when they learn that they are being hunted by some reptile like creatures with ultra sensitive hearing.
I would first of all like to applaud Krasinki for creating a simplistic concept and for the most part making it fast-paced and entertaining; it's almost like Tremors (with the reliance of noise above the ground rather than vibrations to hunt their prey) meets Aliens. I did enjoy this film and found that it contained many tense moments, but despite this praise I still felt that Krasinki failed to look at the bigger picture and I could definitely see room for improvement...
And here we come to the big problem; the story and to be quite honest it was woefully underdeveloped; the film practically starts 89 days in to the apocalypse and by this time we learn that the family are relatively self-sufficient and are already able to speak fluently to one another in sign language? OK, first off how have they survived against all odds for 3 months and more importantly how has anybody managed to teach sign language to the other family members for 3 months without being heard by the creatures? Yes I get that they can exist like this once they all know sign language, but unless they can all speak sign language before the apocalypse occurs it makes no logical sense that this could have been learned or developed in a world where these creatures now exist. I did read the trivia section in IMDB for this film and understand that the girl in the film is deaf in real life so understand how everyone learned sign language for the film, but cinema is supposed to be a story so this still should be explained within the film (after all we're lead to believe that they have had to adapt to this kind of lifestyle rather than it being something that they had already conveniently learnt).
Another issue with these creatures is that they apparently have extremely good hearing (as is shown by their neat looking ear drums) and yet when they are stood a matter of feet away from humans who are breathing at a fairly rapid rate (understandably through fear etc) they are not able to find the humans by their breathing, nor are they able to hear them moving round the house??. The creatures are also able to move round buildings without much trouble (even though they allegedly hunt by sound rather than sight which would suggest that their eyesight is either poor or non-existent so how come they never bump into anything). I also found it perplexing that the dad seemed to have set up a bunker under his house with various plans/strategies to thwart the creatures, but this didn't seem to get any focus or bearing until towards the end - even when it does it only feels loosely connected and the final triumph occurs through an earlier plot contrivance rather than through any of the dad's meticulous planning.
I've given this film quite a bit of stick, but to be fair most of that is because of its poorly thought out and rather threadbare narrative - I will put a caveat here as if this film has a prequel or sequel in the future to explain some of my objections I may edit my review and possibly amend my vote, but I still think Krasinki did a solid job in the director's chair as this film is mostly about those many individually staged moments (and several of these moments are appropriately nerve-wracking and tense and the many moments of intensity more than make up for the many lapses of logic within the story). Despite its flaws, this is very entertaining and is definitely worth checking out.