A Quiet Place ** (2018, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) – Movie Review

John Krasinski’s family-in-peril horror monster movie is smart, well made and meticulous, but rather slow and dull, and hardly ever at all scary, though it does have two or three good nail-biting scenes. Worst, with an endless back story set-up, it takes a long time to get going, nearly half of its short 90-minute running time. Impatience sets in, and it never really entirely pulls you over onto its side.

Centrally, it is too tame to be a horror monster movie. Inexplicably it has a UK 15 certificate – for ‘sustained threat’ – but that is exactly what it cannot come up with. There is periodic edge-of-seat threat, but unfortunately no sustained threat.

Basically, for reasons unexplained, man-killing creatures have taken over America, and there appears to be only one family of four survivors, who live in silence to hide from the monsters hunting them down only by sound. What has happened to everyone else? The cast of four helps keep the budget low, as does the fairly sparing use of CGI, though that of course is good.

The survival against alien attack is naturally an old premise, though it is always welcome, but for a great monster movie it has to be much more visceral and impactful than it is here. There is a sense in which Krasinski’s meticulous film-making works against him. Junky and trashy, with much less emphasis on character, family relationships and psychological horror, would be much more exciting.

Krasinski also plays the family’s caring dad, but his real-life wife Emily Blunt has the main role as the pregnant mother in peril. Both of them are good actors, and act well as far as possible, but it is mostly a no-acting required movie, just a lot of reacting, and all on the same fearful note: OMG it’s a monster, run!, hide!

Millicent Simmonds as the couple’s deaf daughter Regan in A Quiet Place.

The best, most convincing performance comes from Millicent Simmonds (from Wonderstruck) as the couple’s deaf daughter, Regan. She seems to feel real neglected (by dad) and real terrified (by the monsters). In real life Millicent  is deaf since infancy having lost her hearing from a medication overdose.

Millicent Simmonds is an actress known for Wonderstruck (2017) and A Quiet Place (2018) .

Unfortunately, Krasinski lets the 13-year-old London boy Noah Jupe slightly overact as the son Marcus, with too many wide-eyed looks.

The screenplay is written by Krasinski, Bryan Woods, and Scott Beck, based on a story by Woods and Beck.

Simmonds has only made two films and by coincidence they are released in the UK the same week on 6 April 2018.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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