A Quiet Place is gripping

Movie Title:
A Quiet Place

Grade: A-

Rating: PG-13,
90 minutes

In a Nutshell: We all fell in love with John Krasinski when he first appeared in The Office: The Complete Series.

He has since gone on to show us his action hero chops in movies like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and his creativity and humor in “Lip Sync Battle.” This is now his third time directing and I’m convinced he will continue to bring us something fresh.

If this movie were a typical talking horror movie, it wouldn’t have been nearly as frightening. The tension and suspense are magnified in the silence. #StayQuiet

Tips for parents:

There are a lot of subtitles kids will need to read.
The alien monsters are pretty scary looking.
Children are constantly in perilous situations.
Bloody, dead body.
You see a pregnant woman’s “water” break and later you see blood when she’s getting ready to give birth in a bath tub.

Uplifting theme:

Family, unity
Sacrifice
Resourcefulness

Things I liked:

I loved seeing John Krasinski and his lovely, talented real life wife Emily Blunt in a movie together. I can’t wait to see her in the upcoming “Mary Poppins”!
My niece learned American Sign Language and later married a deaf man who has a cochlear implant, like the one seen in this “silent” movie. It’s so wonderful to see capable deaf people portrayed in films. Another movie that puts ASL in the spotlight is “Rampage.” Millicent Simmonds, who plays Regan Abbott, is actually deaf in real life. This is her second movie; her first was Wonderstruck.
Yes, you get to see the aliens.
Every time I saw a trailer for this movie, the audience would get completely silent and you could feel the tension in the theater. That’s how gripping this movie is.
More often than not, horror movies have a lot of characters so that people can be killed off. The result is usually that we don’t care about them. In this movie, we’re only given one family and we become quickly invested in them.
I always get annoyed by the dumb choices characters make in horror movies, but this family is pretty smart and has figured out how to live in a silent world.
I like that this movie starts on Day 89 after the alien invasion happened. It would have been a much different movie if it had shown Day 1. Not knowing many details about what happened added to the tension.

Things I didn’t like:

It didn’t make sense to me that Regan Abbott would even need a hearing aid in a world where silence is what keeps people alive. Interestingly, it’s her hearing aid that becomes an important part of the story.
The viewer is never told where the alien creatures come from. It appears they simply kill noisy people, rather than eat them. The little we know about them comes from old newspaper headlines that are hung in the family’s basement and a few TV sound bites. Fans of this movie are making all kinds of YouTube videos to talk about the details they wish they knew.
There are some little details that might annoy you, so just don’t worry about them.
If you watch this in a theater, PLEASE be quiet so that everyone else in the theater can enjoy the quiet experience.