Now Watching: A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place is the kind of film I’d probably enjoy more if I could switch off that part of my brain that says ‘this is dumb and doesn’t make sense’. But I couldn’t, so I didn’t. I quite like the concept – a horror film set in a world where mysterious creatures hunt people using sound. I say ‘mysterious’ because the film doesn’t explore their origins, and frankly it doesn’t need to.

But what it did need to do was establish come kind of consistent behaviour for these creatures and that, for me, is where the film stumbles and falls. At times, the creatures in A Quiet Place behave like mindless brutes. Wild animals without reason.

Yet, at others, they behave like intelligent predators, carefully stalking their prey. The film can’t quite seem to decide, so the creatures behaviour changes depending upon what the script requires. And I think that’s why I found it so hard to be engaged by A Quiet Place. What are the rules? What can and can’t you do? How do the creatures determine which sounds are prey and which are not?

The behaviour of the creatures is far too inconsistent for me to be drawn into the suspense the film is clearly going for. I found a scene involving a rusty nail and a bare foot far more unsettling than anything involving the people eating monsters. A Quiet Place also tries to be clever with its world building, but it only results in more distracting questions.

The film makes it clear that these creatures are a global threat, but they didn’t spread so rapidly that people weren’t able to write, print and deliver newspapers about them. So there was obviously time for people to formulate a way of dealing with these creatures. And nobody – seriously nobody – in the world thought that a creature that hunts through and is incredibly sensitive to sound may also be vulnerable to sound?!

I figured that shit out about fifteen minutes in, not because I’m a secret genius but because it’s so f**king obvious. I was also a little annoyed by some of the typical ‘character must do something stupid to create tension’ moments that you kind of expect in a horror film, but this one feels like it should have been smarter about it.

I can’t really fault any of the performances or the direction, it was just the inconsistency of the creatures that spoiled the film for me because once I realised their behaviour was determined purely by what the plot required in any given scene, I couldn’t really take the film seriously or be engaged by it. I did like the way the film ended, though. It was a nice and clever way of punching out.

Overall, A Quiet Place was okay, I guess, and I know not everyone will be as bothered by the details as I am. But for me, an effective horror film is one I come away from feeling unsettled. It plays on my mind in the hours and days after seeing it. But A Quiet Place wasn’t able to achieve that. I came away more annoyed by it than anything, and in a day or two I’ll probably forget all about it.

5/10