Revisiting A Quiet Place (dir. John Krasinski)

‘Silence is the loudest cry’ and in the movie A Quiet Place, this phrase means business. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where extraterrestrial beings now dominate the earth, the movie although intended as a drama/thriller can easily be considered a postmodern, experimental and innovative take on the genre of Horror.

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Directed by John Krasinski, it focuses upon the struggles of a family surviving in a world where the sound of a lantern dropping on the floor can invite death since these beings are blind but extra perceptive to sound.

The opening scene of the film introduces to us an abandoned countryside landscape wherein initially, we observe sounds of the wind whooshing and gliding the fallen dry leaves of autumn on the road followed by the sound of two children moving around barefoot inside the deserted grocery store. The next few scenes introduce the mother, Evelyn Abbott and another child to us succeeding which, we observe the family talking in sign language with the girl who has a hearing impairment. To intensify our perplexity, we are shown the family deliberately attempting to avoid making any sound which raises our heights of suspicion, like when this girl catches the toy rocket which is about to fall from the shelf or Lee Abbott, the father figure explaining in sign language to the youngest child that he can’t have the batteries for his rocket. We reach the conclusion of these strange actions when the youngest child is shown playing with his rocket which when starts making sounds, leads to him being attacked and taken away by an alien-figure which disappears as soon as it had come. 

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With the sudden and unexpected horrific death of the youngest child, the theme of petrifying parental fear and survival in a world where noise equals to immediate death is set in concrete.

Needless to say, the setting provided in the opening scene brilliantly heightens and announces the on-going as well the forthcoming events of the movie. With the sudden and unexpected horrific death of the youngest child, the theme of petrifying parental fear and survival in a world where noise equals to immediate death is set in concrete.

Coming to the visuals, A Quiet Place uses the natural colours of our everyday life. The vibrancy and beauty of late summer or early autumn life shown in the colourful vegetations around the farm, in the yellow dress of the daughter, and even in the slow dancing scene of Evelyn and Lee, all done in an attempt to portray this cinematic universe as authentic and believable as possible. This naturalism in the cinematography aids in invoking the intended-horror in its audience because it seems to be happening in a world which we live in every day. So, to imagine the co-existence of human beings with these dangerous aliens who mean to annihilate all life forms on earth invokes a probable fear in us.

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Dialogues, sound effects, and the background score are a crucial part of Cinema, especially the horror genre because it aids in building up the emotion of anticipation, fear, and anxiety in the audience. However, in A Quiet Place, the dialogues are replaced by sign language and the audible sounds mostly include detailed unavoidable sounds like the sound of the waterfall, the barefoot walking, the creaking of the floor, Evelyn’s moaning and muffled crying during the childbirth scene. There are limited scenes with spoken dialogues like the conversation Lee has with his son near the waterfall and the conversation Lee and Evelyn have in the basement of their barn.

As a conclusion, it is really interesting to see that Krasinski in his horror plot employs silence as the game-changing background score which subtly reminds us of our own fear of the dark midnight’s silence, with realistic visuals inducing fear of the danger lurking in our day-to-day lives.