Last night I had the chance to watch Michael (2026) although I was not in the mood for a biopic that for the most part I know is going to be drama and music, I wanted something more dark and with action, for some reason I landed on a clip about A Quiet Place the third movie so decided why not watch all three, one very night. The movie is not complicated at all and for some might be boring due to the lack of dialogue but just think about it how hard this must be for both the director and the cast to really bring this characters to live if they can not talk. The cast got John Krasinski from The Office directed and starred in this thing alongside his real life wife Emily Blunt and the whole concept is that this family is stuck in a world where blind alien creatures hunt entirely by sound, meaning you make any noise and you are immediately dead. Sounds like a cool setup and I love how much detail they put into this first movie, specially how the aliens get to listen so well, those close ups to their ears are sick, but at the same time its a very simple one that might work for maybe a short or a TV episode but a full movie where characters cannot talk for ninety minutes, come on, how do you sustain that without it getting boring or falling apart. I was expecting a decent enough horror movie that would hold my attention and then disappear from my memory two days later and instead you get a movie that might mess you up for the entire night because its really tense, its not about the monsters been terrifying but its the fact that you cant make a sound, not because of jump scares or gross creature effects but because of how much the whole thing makes you feel like you are watching a real family try to survive something completely impossible without losing each other in the process.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6644200/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
Rottentomatoes Rating
What works in A Quiet Place is not really about the monsters at all, the creatures are terrifying sure and the design on them with that face that opens up like a flower of death is creepy, it almost look like they were taking their skin off, but the real engine running this whole movie is Emily Blunt and John Krasinski and the two kids, Millicent Simmonds as Regan and Noah Jupe as Marcus, because these four people feel like an actual family under pressure in a way that most horror movies never manage to pull off. Blunt in particular is on another level here, the bathtub scene alone where she has to give birth and stay completely silent while a creature is right there in the house with her, that scene had me gripping the arm of my chair even after I have seen the movie more than once, something very few movies accomplish and apparently she shot that entire sequence in one take which tracks because it felt absolutely real and raw and close to unwatchable but in a good way, wasnt gory it was the tension. Simmonds is deaf in real life and you can feel the weight of that in how she carries herself during the whole movie, there is this guilt on Regan about something that happened to her family early on and watching her walk around with all of that on her shoulders while also being the kid who cannot hear the danger coming gives the character this very specific kind of tragedy that a hearing actress just would not have been able to bring to the role. The fact that the family communicates entirely in sign language during the movie means you are constantly watching faces and hands and body language instead of just listening to dialogue and it creates this weird intimacy with these characters that you just dont get on other movies, its hard to build all characters during a single movie and this time they did, aside from the fact that there was one other human aside form the family during the entire movie, you feel like you know these people after ninety minutes even though you barely heard any of them speak out loud.
The silence as a tool is something that almost never gets used this effectively in mainstream horror and the atmosphere of the movie makes every quiet moment feel loaded with something about to go wrong, the camera holds on small details like a nail sticking out of a step or a patch of sand on the ground near a path and each of those visual clues does more work than a hundred horror movie jump scares combined could do, with this it creates this sense of danger, I was constantly watching for what they could step into or knock off that might create a sound, I remember the paint on at he house floor almost like signaling where to step so the wood floor doesnt make much noise. The sound design alone is some of the best in any horror movie this decade, the whole thing is engineered so that every tiny creak or scrape registers as a threat even when nothing is happening yet and the background sounds did such a great job for every tense moment, I also notice that there is almost zero happy moment during this movie because every other is interrupted by the posibility of loud sounds. There is also something about how the movie forces you to watch it with more focus than usual because when a movie is this quiet you end up leaning in instead of sitting back and then when something does finally break that silence it hits way harder than it would in a regular horror movie where every other scene is already at full volume.
The problem with A Quiet Place is that once you pull back from the emotional stuff and start thinking logically about the world they are living in, there are moments that took out too much of credibility and reason. The grain silo sequence where kids are sinking into corn like quicksand bothered me and I was right about it because when I looked it up that is not really how grain behaves unless it is being actively pulled out from the bottom, specially why didnt they sink when they got under the metal door when the monster jumps in?, the movie needed a tense scene and they made the mistake to let the imagination fly instead of staying on facts. There are also some decisions the family makes that feel more like plot convenience than actual survival instinct, like why would you have a baby in a world where any noise gets you killed immediately and take in consideration the kid they loose during the begining was like what? 10 at most?. I get that the movie weaponise the fact they having a new born to get the tension to the roof at some point, it was literally a time bomb, and during the movie they do address this but the answer it gives feels less like a thought out plan and more like the writer needed the birth scene to happen so they made it happen, yeah they got everything plan out like its safe and considering they already got a wooden box and oxygen ready made me feel like this was not their first time. The pacing in the middle section also dips a bit where you are just waiting for the pieces to connect and the tension tame down a big just slightly before picking back up for the finale, it is not a huge thing but you can feel it. Krasinski made this on a seventeen million dollar budget, which is nothing by Hollywood standards and it went on to make three hundred and forty one million dollars worldwide and makes sense because the movie is basically universal, it does not need a language because half of it has no dialogue.
At the end of the day A Quiet Place is the kind of horror movie that reminds you why the genre can actually be great when someone cares enough to use it for something beyond cheap scares and gets creative enough with the most basic things like sound, silence. Krasinski took a concept about grief and communication and what parents will sacrifice for their children and wrapped it inside a creature feature and somehow both things work at the same time without canceling each other out. I read that Michael Bay was one of the producers on this movie behind his Platinum Dunes company, the same one behind remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th that nobody was exactly begging for. This does not feel much like those movies, because Krasinski came in with such a specific vision that his style completely set the bar very high compare to this other movies Michael Bay try to reboot so hard. Compare this to something like the Annabelle movies that were riding the same wave of real world couple chemistry and family under threat and A Quiet Place absolutely destroys them in terms of craft and emotional payoff, and when I say craft Im not refering to effects but its through character build up that makes you care for this family. I bet Emily Blunt should have been consider for a couple of awards that year but back in the day I was not into movies that much, this hobbie came to me during the Pandemic. My only actual complain about the movie are the logic holes that for sure will bother you if you think about them too hard but the emotional punches hit every single time and makes you forget about it just laugh at it like they really did that. I will give A Quiet Place a 7.5 out of 10, it could be a solid 8 but I felt it was just too short but at the same time they had to because this was not a movie that could last too long, specially consider how hard it starts and the huge cliffhanger at the end, a rare case where a high concept horror movie actually lives up to the potential of its idea, I totally recommend it, tonight I'll watch the part II.
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