One note film

Rating: 4/10 (26 August 2019)

A Quiet Place relies on a single idea. An idea that sounds intriguing for a horror film. The idea that you can't make loud noises or else a monster will kill you. But that's all the film does. It relies on that one single aspect of the idea. It doesn't develop it or try to build anything around it. It's just used to build more and more thousand times already seen cheap jump scares around it.
A Quiet Place centers around one family attempting to survive in this new hostile world. It's never explained where the monsters came from. And to be frank, it's all the same. A Quiet Place is in the end a rather small film. John Krasinski plays the father of the family and Emily Blunt, his real-life wife, is her on screen wife as well. They have a son and a daughter and are coping with the tragic loss of their youngest. Their daughter literally silently blames herself for it. The family is about to welcome a new one as the mother is pregnant.
Immediately when I saw the swollen stomach of Emily Blunt, I thought that this is a bad idea. It feels as if the pregnancy is thrown into the mix to put the characters yet in to another hot box and to create some jump scares. The fact that the actual delivery is over very quickly just ads to the notion that it's just another gimmick.
What I would have liked, as the name of the movie suggests, for it to be quiet. There is a soundtrack playing in the background, which usually heightens when the monsters are hunting the family. A picture without a soundtrack would have added to the atmosphere of the film. It's too bad, especially since there's a nice little sequence between Krasinski and Blunt holding each other close and listening to music through headphones.
A Quiet Place is rather disappointing. It doesn't develop the initial idea beyond the basic premise. It also offers no surprises. What you expect to happen, happens and nothing else. The quietness is only used as a gimmick to deliver cheap jump scares.