A Qui­et Place

In Guy Maddin’s 1992 retro-sur­re­al­ist Alpine melo­dra­ma Care­ful, the expres­sion of any emo­tion risks bring­ing an avalanche down on the moun­tain town of Tolzbad, and so all the locals must repress their desires or face the dead­ly consequences.

John Krasinksi’s A Qui­et Place might seem a mil­lion miles from this – after all, it has an Amer­i­can rur­al loca­tion, it is set a cou­ple of years in the future rather than in a cine-nos­tal­gic past, and its genre is deter­mined­ly hor­ror – but nonethe­less there are cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties. For here too, feel­ings (of love and loss, of guilt and recrim­i­na­tion) have nec­es­sar­i­ly remained unspo­ken, result­ing in divi­sion and dysfunction.

A Qui­et Place opens with the cap­tion ​‘Day 89’, although from what exact­ly is left for the view­er to dis­cov­er with­out the aid of oral expo­si­tion, as cou­ple Eve­lyn and Lee Abbott (real-life cou­ple Emi­ly Blunt and Krasin­s­ki) and their three chil­dren – Regan (Mil­li­cent Sim­monds), Mar­cus (Noah Jupe) and the youngest, Beau (Cade Wood­ward) – move bare­foot and every so qui­et­ly through a ghost town in search of med­i­cine. If they com­mu­ni­cate at all, it is through the sign lan­guage that they all know because Regan is deaf-mute.

When, on the way home, four-year-old Beau acti­vates a noisy toy, he is almost instant­ly snatched and killed before all their eyes by a crea­ture that gal­lops out from the for­est, attract­ed to the sound. This is an apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nario, where exquis­ite­ly realised alien mon­sters, blind but with extreme­ly sen­si­tive hear­ing, relent­less­ly hunt their prey, lis­ten­ing out for the slight­est audi­to­ry trace.

Cut to Day 473, and the rest of the Abbotts are sur­viv­ing in grief and silence. As well as con­struct­ing their lives to stay safe from the crea­tures, they also tip­toe around each other’s emo­tions, with Regan silent­ly blam­ing her­self for Beau’s death, and Lee awk­ward­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing his love for his daugh­ter by con­stant­ly try­ing to build her a work­ing hear­ing aid that she keeps reject­ing. Eve­lyn is expect­ing a baby very soon, which, though an invest­ment in the future, prac­ti­cal­ly guar­an­tees that things are about to get per­ilous­ly loud – and with no vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties yet appar­ent in the snarling preda­tors, it takes just a sin­gle noise to put everyone’s life in danger.

The action of A Qui­et Place plays out in a sim­i­lar – and sim­i­lar­ly tense – cat-and-mouse mode to Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe, as char­ac­ters must avoid mak­ing any sound no mat­ter what they are endur­ing (from griev­ous injuries to absolute ter­ror even to giv­ing birth). What is dif­fer­ent here, though, is that the Abbotts are not pet­ty crim­i­nals, but mem­bers of a fam­i­ly, each defined by their indi­vid­ual will­ing­ness to under­take per­son­al risk to help the others.

Accord­ing­ly, although this clan is at first belea­guered by its own inner ten­sions, it even­tu­al­ly comes togeth­er against an implaca­ble exter­nal foe. Pre­sent­ing the domes­tic unit and pro­tec­tive par­ent­ing as cru­cial salves in times of despair, Krasin­s­ki finds room for sen­ti­ment, even opti­mism, amid this avalanche of toothy sus­pense thrills.