A Quiet Place (2018) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 34

Last night's pick, Paranormal Activity, made a house sound like it was breathing. Night thirty-four takes the opposite approach and asks what happens when the whole world has to stop making noise. A Quiet Place is a creature feature with a very simple law: the things hunting the Abbott family can't see, but they can hear nearly everything, and anyone who makes a sound is as good as dead. It sounds like a gimmick, and it could have been. What turns it into one of the best horror movies of the last decade is how little the film treats it that way.

Start with who's on screen. John Krasinski, who directed, co-wrote, and stars as Lee Abbott, was best known as a sitcom actor before this, and he surrounds himself with a cast that makes the movie feel lived-in right away. Emily Blunt plays Evelyn, his wife, and the pair play off each other with the easy shorthand of a couple who've been through a lot, which makes sense, since they're married in real life. Millicent Simmonds plays their daughter Regan, and Simmonds is deaf, a casting choice that changes everything about how the film feels. The family communicates in American Sign Language, so what looks like a survival trick is really just the way they already talk. Noah Jupe and Cade Woodward round out the family as the two younger kids. By the time the first moment of danger arrives, you aren't watching strangers. You're watching people you've already started to worry about.

That's the secret of the movie. It's a family drama dressed as a monster film, and the real tension lives between the characters: a father who can't quite say what he means, a daughter who thinks she's the reason for the family's worst day, a mother holding together a house that has no room for mistakes. The creatures are terrifying, with their armored bodies and razor-sharp hearing, but they work best as a pressure that makes every small human moment matter. A shared meal, a board game played with soft pieces, a bit of sign language across a table: each of those is quietly heartbreaking because you know what it costs them.

Then there's the craft. Everything in the farmhouse has been shaped around making as little noise as possible, from the sand paths the family walks barefoot to the soft board games and the little ways they've learned to live like ghosts. The sound team of Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn earned an Oscar nomination for Best Sound Editing, which feels right for a film where sound is both the weapon and the villain. Marco Beltrami's score arrives in careful bursts, and the way the film plays with Regan's point of view, cutting to total silence in her scenes, makes you feel the difference between her world and everyone else's. It was made for $17 million and went on to earn more than $340 million worldwide, and it later spawned a sequel and a prequel, which says plenty about how well the idea landed.

If you're collecting, this is a title where the audio matters as much as the picture. The 4K release carries Dolby Vision and a Dolby Atmos mix that reviewers have called demo material, with a rumble in the low end and enough height in the ambience to make the farm feel enormous. The film was shot on 35mm and Super 35, so you want a transfer that keeps the grain and the natural, nighttime blacks. The extras are on the Blu-ray in the package: a making-of called Creating the Quiet, a look at the sound work called The Sound of Darkness, and a visual-effects piece called A Reason for Silence. There's no commentary, which is a shame, because a track from Krasinski would be a great listen. Collectors who like a bit of shelf flair can look for the 2020 Mondo X SteelBook, which uses artwork inspired by Matt Ryan Tobin's poster of the family's red string lights, though it's the same disc inside.

I keep coming back to a question this film leaves hanging. If your family had to live inside a rule like this one, which small habit would be the hardest to give up: your voice, your laughter, or the simple comfort of saying "I love you" out loud?

Part of the 50 Days of Horror series.