A Quiet Place

Dir: John Krasinski

2018

****

A Quiet Place is regarded as one of the best films of 2018 and it is indeed a great film. However, there is very little original about it and it is full of flaws. I will address this straight away and declare that it really doesn’t matter because for all of it’s faults – and even though A Quiet Place follows a tried and tested formula – it has perfected several components that are needed to make a good horror/thriller/suspense movie. Like I say, it isn’t original as such but it might as well be because there is no other horror film like it. John Krasinski has received high praise for the film – and so he should – but I think story writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have been a little overlooked. Beck and Woods grew up together in the US state of Iowa, and were huge fans of silent film. By 2013, they began working on the story that would lead to the A Quiet Place. They used their experience growing up close to farmland as the basis, including a grain silo setting as a place considered dangerous in their upbringing. They initiated their approach with a 15-page proof of concept. The writer’s story was snapped up by Paramount Pictures and at the time was on the list of most anticipated scripts of the year. However, Paramount Pictures wanted to incorporate the pair’s story into their Cloverfield franchise. Beck admitted that "I guess it crossed our mind and we had spoken to our representatives about that possibility. It was weird timing, though, because when we were writing the script in 2016, 10 Cloverfield Lane was at Paramount. We were actually talking to an executive there about this film, and it felt from pitch form that there might be crossover, but when we finally took the final script in to Paramount, they saw it as a totally different movie." The screenwriters and director John Krasinski were ultimately relieved and grateful for Paramount to finally decide to allow them to make the film as a wholly original, stand-alone film, rather than to make it as a part of the Cloverfield film franchise, or any other film franchise for that matter. "One of our biggest fears was this getting swept up into some kind of franchise or repurposed for something like that," Woods added. "The reason I say 'biggest fear' - we love the 'Cloverfield' movies. They're excellent. It's just that as film-goers, we crave new and original ideas, and we feel like so much of what's out there is IP. It's comic books, it's remakes, it's sequels. We show up to all of them, we enjoy those movies too, but our dream was always to drop something different into the marketplace, so we feel grateful that Paramount embraced the movie as its own thing." Krasinski wasn’t originally interested in the project, saying firmly “I don’t do horror” but he changed his mind once he read the script and was inspired by the family element of the story. Funnily enough though, Krasinski actually fulled out of The Cloverfield Paradox to star in A Quiet Place. The premise is super simple – in a post-apocalyptic America where a large portion of the population have been wiped out by an alien species, a family of five do their best to survive. The alien beings stay hidden for most of the time and are known to be blind – there abilities of detection come only from their sense of hearing, which is higher than ours. The Abbott family – wife Evelyn, husband Lee, congenitally deaf daughter Regan, and sons Marcus and Beau all know sign language which we assume is the reason they’ve been able to adapt to a silent existence better than others. The film is mainly silent with only a few lines of dialogue throughout the whole movie. The silence and the continuous creeping around brings untold levels of suspense without a cliché in sight. The countless haunted house movies of late have become so predictable that horror is largely boring, rather than scary, but A Quiet Place manages to bring that excruciating suspense to the audience almost effortlessly and the technique hasn’t been this effective since 1976’s Jaws. The story also commits what is usually a cardinal sin, in that it explores the worst-case scenario in the opening scene and the rest of the film is about how the family cope in the aftermath (and I’m not talking about the alien invasion). The idiot plot is kind of at work here – the idiot plot being a theory that in every horror film our characters have to act like idiots, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in and/or die – but it is also quite clever. There are many moments where I screamed at the screen “Why would they do that?” but that is very much part and parcel of the horror movies experience, at least the film makers made me care about the characters and I didn’t want any harm to come to them. It’s nice to see a family take on aliens too, an already established romance means they can just get on with the story without all the of the ‘getting to know you’ nonsense. Indeed, character development wasn’t really that important for once, the Abbott family are much like any other family, so the viewer can instantly relate to them and fill in the necessary gaps themselves. The performances are very good but I thought the young Noah Jupe was particularity good as I think his portrayal of fear is about as close to real as you can get, especially for someone his age. The alien didn’t look that great and I’m not sure how the military was completely wiped out by them, but in some respects they weren’t the most important aspect. I like it as a stand alone film personally but the story does open up many opportunities. Simplicity is king with this one but unlike the Paranormal Activity films there is passion here, the film is alive and the performances are real. The viewer becomes part of the film and the lack of sound draws us in even more so. It kind of puts an end to the theory that sound effects are most important when it comes to horror because A Quiet Place had none and is one of the scariest films of the past decade.