A Quiet Place - Review - Mind on Movies

A Quiet Place is in theaters on April 6th, 2018.

A Quiet Place is fantastic. Coming from someone who isn’t a fan of horror or flat out scary movies, I absolutely loved it and I think you will too. Feel free to leave this review and buy your tickets, you can come back later to read the rest with no worries. Now if you’ve decided to stick around, I will explain why I loved it so much.

A Quiet Place is a story of survival. A family is in a world taken over by monsters that hear even the slightest sound, and if you’re the one making that sound, they will kill you. This film is starred, co-written and directed by John Krasinski. Yes, the hilarious man from The Office. In the film, his wife is played by his real-life wife Emily Blunt! They are both on their A- Game for this project. Also, the children of this film are unbelievable. Especially both Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe. I love seeing young actors absolutely kill roles like this because I can look out for them in the future and watch them grow. Both of these kids deserve that kind of attention, especially with the small amount of their actual voices are used in the film.

The amount of dialogue the characters have is so minimal, the entire family must use sign language for most of their communication. The talent on display for using facial expressions that feel genuine and convey the fear and threat of the monsters is always spot on. Not one performance is less than fantastic.

The use of suspense in this film is what keeps the audience on their toes. There are a few jump scares early in the first act. This made me nervous, jump scares are usually a point of poor writing to try to make a movie that isn’t creepy into a screamfest. Instead, these jump scares are used to portray how real the threat of the monsters are, and how important it is for this family to stay silent. That way, jump scares aren’t needed throughout the duration of the film because we are already afraid for these characters and understand what can happen. Instead of jump scares, Krasinski plays with the duration of time between the audience and the characters learning of threats to make the film scary. At moments, we see things that the characters have yet to see, and other times the characters see something that is off screen that keeps us waiting for a reveal. This technique is used beautifully to make this more of a thriller than a horror movie.

I really don’t want to give anything away in my review, so I think I’m going to purposefully cut myself short here. All I can say is go see A Quiet Place. This film deserves to make money and it deserves to be seen and appreciated in a theater. With a film so quiet, a theater sound system really sells the experience. It reminded me so much of one of my favorite films of all time, Signs. We follow a family, in a world very different from our own, and we only see their perspective of what’s happening. We don’t care about any sort of global threat because we’re too worried about these specific characters making it out of any given situation. Also, the themes and hints throughout the movie really pay off in the end, also very similar to Signs, but done in an even more convincing way.

Go see A Quiet Place and let us know what you think down below! I dare say that I guarantee you will enjoy yourself!

Rating: 4.25 out of 5

Logan (Contributor) is a Texas native and a massive fan of all genres of film. You can find him talking about movies on YouTube as half of the CraZCouple or in line for the latest Star Wars/Comic Book film.
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A Quiet Place takes place in the year 2020. The world has turned into a post apocalyptic wasteland and very few people are still alive. This film follows a family going through this incredibly high tension situation, where if they make a single sound, creatures will come and kill them. When one of the children presses a sound button on his toy rocket, the creatures begin to hunt for him and the rest of the family. Will they all stay silent and survive or will they be slaughtered like the rest of the humans.

“A Quiet Place” is directed and stars John Krasinski. And to my surprise, this film is my favorite film of the year so far. To start with the cast we have John Krasinski (previously seen in “The Office” and “Away We Go”) as the father of the family Lee. Through his character you can see all the emotion going on as he struggles to keep the family united. Acting with Krasinski is Emily Blunt (previously seen in “Edge of Tomorrow” and “The Devil Wears Prada) as Evelyn the wife of Lee. There is so much tension with her character throughout that she immediately becomes relatable. And the children actors in this film were absolutely brilliant. Noah Jupe (previously seen in “Wonder” and “Suburbicon”) absolutely killed it as Marcus one of the children in the film. His reactions to things were so realistic and added so much depth to his performance. And finally I have to address Millicent Simmonds (who has only previously acted in “Wonderstruck”) as the deaf girl Regan. What Krasinski does with her character is brilliant showing that she literally can not hear during all the intense scenes. He also cuts to her perspective constantly with such a silent ambient noise playing throughout her scenes. And her emotion that has built up throughout this apocalypse is absolutely brilliant. We will definitely be seeing her in more films down the road.

Diving deeper into this film, it takes such a smart twist on a typical horror film. Cliche things will happen, but then the characters will react like normal people and be like “Okay, we made a bad choice...let's not do that again”. Rather than how in your typical horror movie the characters just make constant stupid choices throughout, the characters in this film learn from their bad decisions. And the cinematography throughout this film is fantastic. It totally adds another layer of quality. But by far the best part of the film is the silence throughout. Krasinski has created a horror masterpiece and this film will definitely be mentioned on my top 10 list towards the end of the year.

For my overall thoughts, I really can not think of many negatives with this film besides from a few pacing issues. John Krasinski absolutely killed this film and delivered a brilliant performance while also pulling great performances from his actors. I would recommend anyone with interest in this film to check it out! Definitely a great twist on the genre.

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

Cabell (Contributor) is a filmmaker from Tampa, Florida. He will watch just about any film but when he's not reviewing the latest hits he spends time directing films of his own.
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