An attractive young couple (Emily Blunt and John Krasinski) seem like theyre raising their kids in a homesteaders dream: long country walks, board games by gaslight, smoking their own trout.
Except its not some idyllic, back-to-the-land lifestyle choice; its the new reality of living in a world taken over by man-eating alien predators.
And the family use sign language in lieu of speaking not just because their daughter (Wonderstrucks Millicent Simmonds) is deaf, but because these creatures blind, skittering bugs that look like a crab and a spider had a nightmare are primed to attack at sound.
Credit: Jonny Cournoyer/ Paramount Pictures
Stay Silent, Stay Alive is the motto, and Krasinski, who also directs, has conjured a taut, breathless little trick of a movie around it: 90 minutes of slow-drip dread and well-earned jump scares that dissipate, oddly, only when the silence is broken.
Set in a post-invasion wasteland marked by ragged missing-person posters, plundered drugstores, and eerily empty streets, the story establishes its ground rules and the turning point of an early tragedy before narrowing in on Blunts heavily pregnant mother (dont newborns cry?
A lot?)
and the two elder children (Simmonds, one of the few young hearing-impaired actresses working in mainstream movies today, andSuburbicons Noah Jupe, both great).
Thats also where the dialogue begins to creep in, and talking tends to break the spell, or just spell things out too literally.
Like the clues displayed in Krasinskis characters basement workshop, with its scribbled-on white boards and old news clippings, even those few lines make it feel as if he doesnt quite trust the audience to catch up otherwise.
But he also builds a sustained mood in ways that feels both modern and pleasingly old-school, with its shades ofClose Encounters of the Third Kindand other 80s touchstones.
And whenA Quiet Placehas one finger on the panic button and the other on mute, its a nervy, terrifying thrill.B+
