A Quiet Place

This near silent movie explodes with so much force that you are startled t the core by its unexpected pulling strings. The only explosive sounds you here are of excellence, precision, emotion and sheer survival in the face of a devastating alien monster invasion which leaves next to no humanity on Earth.

Now these craftily curated monsters are predators of sound. They are otherwise blind to everything but just a tap or even whisper can bring them to the spot in seconds to eat up everything around. The near perfection of this movie lies in the fact that writer-director-actor John Karsinsky is courageous enough to nattily shape a 1 hour 95 minutes feature film without using dialogues and serenading the sound of silence in any which way you can imagine.

The actors (there are only five in the entire film) walk barefoot; the wife puts up cloth chimes so that no sound comes out of them; the family talks in sign language; laughter, tears and even frightful screams are silent. No floors can creek, no baby can cry and no sounds of everyday life can be created, not even a whiff of them.

And yet, the patience with which the viewers are drawn into the absolutely tense proceedings, kept skillfully taut to the end, goading your interest relentlessly can’t be anything but a marvel of experimental cinema which the likes of Steven Spielberg are known to orchestrate on the big canvas.

The brilliance of Kransinsky and his tantalisingly intricate yet simple movie lies in the way he keeps his canvas utilitarian with no grand monster, aerial or panning shots used to prop up the destruction. The landscape is ruinous, almost debris but nothing is done to enhance the fallout of such mass destruction. The characters, including the two children — one boy who shows up fear with distinction and the girl who is deaf, feels betrayed by her father and extremely headstrong — add to anxiety levels that the film hypes up constantly and beautifully.

The farm house which the family lives in would have been great if life had been left to survive on the planet; the simple mores with which the family embeds the need for sounds is marvellous, as fantastic as the stunning way in which Emily Blunt gives birth to a child, somehow dealing with the sound of a crying baby just born into the world where a monster is lurking next to its mother’s womb to sniff a sob of pain or birth.

This particular scene is the showstopper of the film and its prolonged 15-minute sequence draws the viewers into forgetting to breathe just like Blunt who has to give birth in a mess of blood and strain and in the absence of her husband and two kids who have gone out to get fish for dinner.

In short, A Quiet Place is a marvellous survival film which is near chinkless, entirely engrossing and a momentous moment-to-moment saga which graces cinema halls across the world only once in a while. Definitely, this one is the movie of the year.

Source: Sunday Pioneer,  8 April, 2018