A Quiet Place (2018)

ffs

it's absolutely a strength that the script keeps ramping up tension / frustration by doing things like "wtf why does he have all this radio stuff that makes sound," or "what the shit, why does he need to go to his offsite pitchfork stash when he had a shotgun earlier," and then later on showing you that the basement has been soundproofed as fuck in the course of revealing a whole series of other things about their preparation.

because Jim wants to find out that they are not the only functioning humans left alive in the world, and form a society!

The first time you see him light his fire beacon he sees all these other fire beacons being lit, so forget the rest of the world, he knows they're not the only one within a couple of square miles. Though the movie does imply that as usual in the apocalypse, other people are as much of a problem as the primary problem.

I like how they holed up in a house seemingly stacked top to bottom with rusty cans and the like. My first duty would be to quietly remove all the rusty cans and whatnot. Though I guess no one made any noise with all the clutter, so maybe it was precious clutter.

Early on, the deaf girl stares into the basement, turns on the light, then is about to take a few tentative steps down when Jim stops her and gets mad. "Don't go down there!" he signs, iirc. And she's all "why not?" And he's all "just don't." And I'm all "why not?" Is that where he keeps his radio? Is he just worried she'll start scanning for reception or something? Or does he know the radio, which makes noise, is dangerous? That and the flood, I totally missed something.

My family and I watched the sad "Andre the Giant" documentary last night, and needless to say both girls were perplexed. People actually watched this stuff? Why did they watch it if they knew it was fake? They are such bad actors, people watched this? And so on. And the best we came up with was, well, some people watched it to be entertained, not to be convinced it was "real," and it made me think of this movie, which we had just seen, and it made me consider that a movie doesn't have to be perfect to be good and doesn't have to make perfect sense and so on. Which is fair, and also why I stressed to my daughter that I don't know if this movie was necessarily bad, I just didn't like it. But it still doesn't excuse the directorial decision of accompanying every single jump scare with a HUGE LOUD NOISE which even my kid started to find repetitive and annoying, especially for a movie ostensibly about staying quiet, and definitely shows they did not have the courage of their convictions to let the tension work on its own and were hedging their bets.

Can I emphasize again how much I hated the triumphant ending, which rang totally false, given the horrific life this family had been living for over a year and the tragedy that had literally just taken their paterfamilias for no good reason? Another mystery: on his mostly unnecessary whiteboard, he had scribbled something like "number of monsters: 3, confirmed?" I guess those were just the territorial neighborhood monsters? Because clearly there are lots of monsters around, and they seem to be willing to hustle to any source of noise. (Though again, if a couple of woodchucks catch their ear, you'd think they'd get tired from all this aimless running around in search of every mouse fart.)

A bloodhound can track the path of a single individual through a high traffic area after 48 hours. An ear monster which looks like one giant cochlea can stand right in front of you and not hear your stifled breathing, or heartbeat, come now

I sort of suspected that they weren't eating people, they just had really sensitive hearing and were killing everything just to get some peace and quiet.

I think the movie turned for me the 20th time someone put their finger to their mouth to signal "shhhhh!" After a year of being stalked by ear monsters, you'd think "shhh" would be the default. Maybe finger to the lips means "extra shhhhh"?

lol same

ever been in a school cafeteria where the teachers tell the kids not to talk...how does that typically go?

the water in the basement thing was very clearly communicated btw how did you guys miss that

so what was it?

the monster damaged a pipe while it was looking for them, there's a slow pan to reveal it after John k leaves the barn

I remember the pan, I just didn't catch what precipitated it. would there even be running water over a year after all the sewage systems have been abandoned?

I think, like Josh, I just looked away at the wrong moment. Possibly glancing around after someone's reaction to a monster scare!

Kras delivering a rather longwinded ASL proclamation of love to his kids as a murderous alien attempts to claw through the roof directly over their heads was a personal highlight

lengthy not longwinded

the water in the basement thing was very clearly communicated btw how did you guys miss that

― gbx, Sunday, April 15, 2018 4:35 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kind of the theme of the thread so far

this was effective even if I never accepted that the dad and his kid could talk beneath a waterfall but can't whisper within the four walls of a home

Can I emphasize again how much I hated the triumphant ending, which rang totally false, given the horrific life this family had been living for over a year and the tragedy that had literally just taken their paterfamilias for no good reason?

where did you see triumph? They figured out how to win against the creatures; it's revenge, not triumph

SPOILERS

the point at which it completely lost me was when she was about to give birth (alone, because of course everyone would go off and do random things alone in this universe, that makes perfect sense and is perfectly logical) and she stumbled down the stairs and pierced her foot on a spike that was shown to the audience just moments earlier with great big flashing jazz lights saying "PAY ATTENTION TO THIS SPIKE IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT AND WILL FACTOR INTO THE PLOT VERY SOON". she could have just let out a scream because she's having a baby and it's fucking painful, but no, there needed to be a comedy foot piercing as well, because contrivance upon contrivance is how farce builds to a climax, and because the filmmakers don't trust their audience

― karl wallogina (Autumn Almanac),

you must loathe Hitchcock

I'm impressed that Krasinski and Blunt managed to have sex silently

also how do they muffle bathroom noises

this movie was ok

plenty of dumb shit in it but a pleasant enough hour-plus

that's about it

otm

xpost The triumph is that it literally ends with a grinning Emily Blunt pumping the shotgun in preparation for the monsters arriving. They figured it out, cracked the code, learned how to stop them. But it did not feel like revenge to me, it felt like a cute Hollywood ending.

I liked the Red Letter review. They mostly liked it, but wished there was just a little more emotional drama to it. For example, when Jim (do the characters have names?) tells his daughter how much he loves her, was there ever any doubt whatsoever that either of her parents didn't love her? And the scene where Emily Blunt is with the baby in the basement, what if for even a moment she had to decide: the baby or me? For that matter, they brought up, the subject of the baby at all would have been a rich source of character development. Maybe one parent wanted it and the other didn't? Maybe there would be some discussion at all about the merits of raising this baby in a world where raising a baby seems like a death warrant?

Honestly, I'm happy not to have that information if that is how they managed to keep it to 90 minutes. However, that kind of conflict would have made it a better movie.

The triumph is that it literally ends with a grinning Emily Blunt pumping the shotgun in preparation for the monsters arriving. They figured it out, cracked the code, learned how to stop them. But it did not feel like revenge to me, it felt like a cute Hollywood ending.

I still don't see how this is cheesy but ok. Killing the creatures will bring no lasting satisfaction, as I'm sure she'll learn when Earth returns to normal and she returns to therapy.

"Monsters. Packs? WHAT IS THEIR WEAKNESS? THERAPY!?!"

i wanted to know more about the monsters. where they were educated. what their feelings were.

"do they have feelings? reason with them!?"

I will say that if I were one of those creatures I also could not wait to sink my claws into John Krasinki.

With only one thing driving the narrative, I don't think there's much room for this to be great, to resonate above and beyond the scare scenes. All it can be is really efficient, and it is. I like that they join the story on Day 89. Robin Wood probably would have hated the deification of the traditional family, right up to the ultimate selflessness of dad, but maybe he'd like the females-now-in-charge ending. If this actually is about anything, I just work from the assumption these days that everything's about Trump.

The exposition wall was hilarious - everyone laughs at the whiteboard American Tim from the office keeps up in case he forgets that the creatures are armoured or that he doesn’t know how to kill them, but to me the newspaper clippings are funnier. There’s one that’s like THEY CAN HEAR YOU, which suggests that up to that point everyone has been working from the assumption that the ear monsters are deaf

This was p good, nail was the best part

Given they know what gets them and studio has talked sequel, the next movie should be called A Loud Place and just be 90 minutes of people shouting over blaring high frequencies and feedback.

nail was truly horrible and worse than the monsters

I wish Phantom Thread had started on Day 89.

lol

Why wouldn't you live by the waterfall / river?

Don't power stations / waterworks / fucking *printing presses* make noise?

Aliens were already defeated like this in 'Mars Attacks'

Blaring soundtrack defeated any chance of this film actually doing anything interesting with sound.

Astonished this is at 95%,on Rotten Tomatoes.

Aliens were already defeated like this in 'Mars Attacks'

And in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Why wouldn't you live by the waterfall / river?

My first thought as soon as they went to the waterfall. FFS, just live there you idjuts

Oh also, we watched about 30 mins of this film on a d/l at home before realising we prob should put the subtitles on for all the signing. I dont even think we missed much tbh.

It would probably make a lot of noise to build the roads to move all the materials and tools to build a house and excavation equipment and electricity pylons and whatnot

sleeping in a tent >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> living in a house where monsters will kill you for making a sound

yeah but! their driving force is to find other surviving groups of humans and either build or rejoin a society. this is the motivation for p much all their non-immediate-survival actions. if the film was about ppl who wanted to live in a tent by themselves, it would be about different characters.

I'm not endorsing these probable nutbag evangelist-like Christians who insist on procreating, but they're the protagonists of the film as released, and they don't want inbred grandbabies.

look i’m happy to accept that all the characters in this movie just happen to be a bit dim xp

I was unhappy to accept that John Krasinski wasn't nude.

just watched this last night. much of it was enjoyable but some was so silly i couldn't help but laugh. the whole "let's have a baby when the thing that kills us is noise" was full of hubris. a better film i think would've killed them all for it - i thought for sure the baby would end up suffocating in that terrible baby box before i realized it wasn't that kind of movie. it was a family film about the love of parents for their children masquerading as a horror flick. the older daughter should've died in the corn silo, the baby in the baby box, and the son and father should've died before credits. a better movie would've ended with just the mother left alive and the audience realizing that her time was running out soon. or a scarier movie at least.

while watching we kept coming up with things that could kill you in this world. like if you snore too loud one night. or fart too loud. i guess if you have ibs you're dead pretty quickly.

I prefer your ending

This movie didnt really work at all tbh

the kid on the trail should totally have farted instead of pressed the button on the toy

dramatic, slo-mo John & Emily wheel-around