A Quiet Place

472 days after a devastating apocalyptic-level attack by unknown alien creatures who seem to have the ability to hear sounds at an alarmingly astute level, Lee and Evelyn Abbott, along with their two kids, have carved out a nearly completely silent life trying to survive the invasion. No one knows exactly how to defeat the creatures, and so humanity has been wiped out save for a few survivors like the Abbotts. Lee and his family succeed in surviving for quite awhile until it's discovered that Evelyn is pregnant. Once the gravity of the situation hits the family, they do everything they can to ensure the safety and survival of the family, including the unborn child.

I normally can't really stand horror (with a few notable exceptions), yet I found A Quiet Place to be a pretty brilliant idea turned into an almost equally brilliant end product using sound - or rather, the lack of it - as a means to ramp up the uneasiness and intrigue of having to live in a post-apocalypic world ravaged by aliens. In the end it turned out to be more suspense rather than true horror. This could have been just another Independence Day, Signs, or War of the Worlds, but it ends up separating itself from those by inviting the audience to actually care for the characters we see onscreen. Where the others are mostly all about the spectacle of the action scenes, A Quiet Place allows us to gain a peek into the lives of one family and how they are dealing with the devastating situation around them. It lets us actually see the raw emotions, the stress and brokenness, and even the forgiveness of a major transgression, as well as how strong the bond of a family can be. While the movie as a whole was more suspenseful than horror, I found myself legitimately full-blown scared for the safety of each of the characters due to the depth of the characters and the story. I also loved how they included the aspect of the daughter being deaf and having to use a cochlear implant; not only from a perspective of having included a character with a disability, but it also created an interesting plot device during the climax of the movie. The girl, Millicent Simmonds, is also legitimately deaf since birth from a medication overdose, so to see someone acting onscreen with an actual disability made me happy having a disability myself.

While A Quiet Place without a doubt will remain on my top 10 of the year, it's not without it's problems. There's some continuity issues, such as it's kind of unclear whether Evelyn becomes pregnant before or after the invasion, so it's hard not to wonder why anyone would be crazy enough to bring a newborn into a world such as this. It certainly creates a good level of suspense in how the family will survive, but on a realistic level it's kind of confusing. It also seems there's some 'director's discretion' when it comes to how perceptive the aliens are to sound, as well as how quickly they react to said sound. Again, it's not enough to make me dislike the film any less, but it just happened to be something I noticed while watching.

A Quiet Place is a dang good movie, and one which I would highly recommend, even to some like me who might not have looked into it due to the previews looking like the movie was more horror than suspense.