Blame it on Tim Burton

Rating: 4/10 (22 January 2019)

Imagine waiting in line to see a Hitchcock movie in the 1950s, and hearing somebody walking out of the theater saying "the ending reminded me of Charlie Chaplin's The Fireman".
Not very promising, right? Thankfully no Hitchcok movie fits this description.
However, after watching A Quiet Place, it's almost impossible not to be reminded of Tim Burton's Mars Attacks.
And a quack, funny parody is not a good companion for a horror film.
The movie itself is pretty well made, tense, and up to the ending it pulls few punches: in the first few minutes it shows no mercy towards a child, something few movies dare to do (the much better The Mist comes to mind, but in a very different sense).
However, after lead actor and director Krasinski is killed too, the problem remains, what to do with his surviving family. And the solution is just too dumb to be even tolerable. Although I already checked the "spoilers" box, I feel bad about writing a detailed account: suffice to say, if you watched Mars Attacks, this ending is logically identical, although the tone is (or tries to be) somber.
In today's world, where movies are made by a small army of people, it's impossible to accept that not a single one point this to Krasinski, assuming he had not watched Mars Attacks. So why did he keep it? Let's assume a uniformly bleak -a la The Mist- ending was unacceptable to him and/or the producers (after all, The Mist was produced with a B movie budget because of that ending, that director Frank Darabont and writer Stephen King refused to change). Fine. Can you leave an open ending? Can you think of some other solution, something like the also far from great, but tolerable ending of Bird Box? Anything would have been better than revisiting -albeit involuntarily- an absurd comedy based on 1960s children's playing cards through a horror movie filter.
Yes there are more plotholes, but most sail through the convincing, well made horror of the first half. It is the ending that elicits a loud "give me a break!"