A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place (2018) proceeds almost entirely in silence and draws all of its tension from that one rule. Creatures that hunt by sound have overrun the world. They cannot see, they hear. A family is surviving in the countryside: they walk barefoot, lay sand on the paths, speak in sign language, and signal with light. The film's best decision is that the family already knew sign language. Their daughter is deaf, so this is how they communicated before the catastrophe. The rule is not a constraint imposed on the film, it is their life. Millicent Simmonds, who plays the daughter, is deaf. She insisted on the accuracy of the signing, and John Krasinski changed things in the script at her prompting. The sound design is the real performer. Some scenes cut entirely to what the deaf girl hears, which is nothing, and the danger becomes inaudible to the audience at the same moment. Krasinski directed and starred; Emily Blunt is his wife. It was made on a small budget and vastly exceeded expectations commercially. It runs 91 minutes. Good for: horror, thrillers, and family drama. Less good for: the jump scares are hard, a child dies, and the childbirth sequence is genuinely difficult. Seeing it in a cinema is a completely different experience from watching it at home.