A brainless place

Rating: 3/10 (11 July 2018)

The basic idea of this movie is pretty interesting: a family lives in some unnamed post-apocalyptic/parallel world where they have to stay silent at all times, or otherwise face immediate death from strange 4-legged carnivorous creatures that seem to have superhuman hearing. This point is driven home in the beginning of the movie when the family's youngest son chooses do disobey the father (Krasinsky) by not staying silent, and immediately pays the price. So far so good in terms of build-up. The rest of the movie is one long and painfully slow display of human stupidity at its finest.
A few minutes into to movie we (the audience) already know that the protagonist (the creatures) have exceptional hearing, but apparently cant smell anything or see very well. We know that the creatures go straight for any sound they pick up. We also know that the family has been living like this for over 400 days. With these facts in mind it's fair to assume that any relatively intelligent person or family would have figured out how to pretty easily capture and passify the creatures by now. But no. Instead we are invited to watch painstakingly slow scenes where Krasinski and Blunt are sad, frightened, confused or having problems with their bratty daughter, (who manages to be more annoying than both the kids from Jurassic Park combined). Oh, and they also choose to get Blunt pregnant and give birth to a screaming baby. Great choice considering their environment. To make things even more stupid they are keeping the newborn in a coffin-like construction and fitting the baby with a mask to mute the sound. Perfectly reasonable.
The movie is riddled with these silly slash stupid choices and behaviors (sack of potatoes/ nail in staircase scene, anyone?), so much so that I couldnt help rooting for the creatures.
I loved Krasinski in The Office and Blunt is normally great in her roles - but this movie is so poorly told and has such huge plotholes, that it's near unwatchable. The fact that it has received a 7.8 score on IMDB must either be attributed to the fact that there are amazingly few good movies out there, or that the PR company did a good job of pumping up the score.
If you want a "stay silent"-type thriller, watch "Don't breathe" instead. At least the premise is more coherent and it stays true to it's genre, unlike
"A quiet place" which cant decide if it's a horror movie or an emotional porn flick.
It could have been great, but unless you can ignore this family's incredibly low IQ level, you'll have a hard time watching this.