A Quiet Heart Attack

Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie! This gives a rundown of the full movie and my personal opinion! Do not read if you want to see the movie for yourself!

First off, let me say that, if you are faint of heart, I don’t recommend seeing this. I also don’t recommend letting your younger children see it either. It was without a doubt the best horror film to be released so far this year. I constantly had to remind myself to breathe. While there are more movies scheduled for fall, including the newest Halloween movie, A Quiet Place was absolutely phenomenal and in a league above the rest. Here are a few reasons why.

1. The incorporation of deaf actors and sign language.
2. The husband and wife actually being husband and wife in reality.
3. John Krasinski.

If you didn’t go home after watching this movie and immediately look up some things in sign language, you are weird. Deaf actors in a horror setting made this movie that much more real. To tell you a bit about the plot, this movie follows a family in a post-apocalyptic world, where these blind creatures wipe out anything that makes a sound. To survive, they speak only in sign-language and walk through paths made out of sand to mute their footsteps. Imagine living in a world where you can’t even let the floorboards creek beneath you, and that is the setting of A Quiet Place. When the movie starts, the family is gathering supplies in what you have to assume is a nearby town. The youngest child finds a toy rocket and his parents take it away from him. Upon their departure, the eldest sister, who is played by the deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, hands it back to him with a smile.

Unknowingly to his family, we see the youngest child take the batteries from the toy. During their walk back, the little boy lights up the toy. He plays as the rest of the family silently panics because they can’t afford to make any more sounds. The father runs towards him, but alas, doesn’t make it in time. Yes, the first character to die was a child! Not many directors are willing to do that, and I applaud John’s tenacity.

When we see the family again, the mom is pregnant and the children are back to doing their normal routines. John is attempting to send out distress calls through Morse code, but no one answers. This leaves us to believe that the number of people left, is very, very, low.

In this movie, we see the relationship between real husband and wife John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, who stunningly slayed the audience with her performance. You can tell there is some tension between the eldest daughter and the father, but Emily Blunt is good at being their middle man. Over the next day in the film the father takes the son on a trip to show him how to collect food. After an argument with the daughter over how her hearing aids that he makes for her never work, the guys leave and the daughter storms off. While Emily Blunt has an emotional scene in her late son’s room, the daughter packs a bag and heads to the place where he died. She cuts off the sound for the toy that he had, and leaves it there for him.

We see the guys at the river collecting fish, and the son tells his father that his sister blames herself, and that he should tell her he loves her. They can talk at the river because its loud sound masks all over small sounds nearby. It’s a sweet scene compared to what happens next.

Emily Blunt gets up from where she had been crying and starts to walk funny. She has the picture of her late son in her hand and suddenly her water breaks. She heads downstairs for a reason I’m not sure of and she steps on a nail on the steps. She stays her ground, but the picture frame falls and shatters in the floor below her. From here on out, Emily Blunt’s performance becomes the epitome of fear. She frees her foot, turns on the red light system, letting them know she made a sound, and has to hide from the enormous creatures ascending on her house. She sets a timer up to distract it, while she wobbles upstairs. All the while you can see her fighting her contractions, and going so far as to bite her wrist to not make any noise. The monsters are outside as well so she goes up to the bathroom, and gets it the tub.

The guys see that the lights are red and that they can’t enter the house, so John makes his son go to the family tower to light off some fireworks. Meanwhile Emily fights her body as the monsters get closer and closer. The fireworks save her as she gives out her first scream. John enters the house after all the monsters have fled and he follows the trail of blood to the bathroom where all that’s left in the tub is blood. The entire audience was holding their breath as John slid down the wall, his eyes growing red, and then BAM, she was in the stand up shower, the baby wrapped in a blanket. Everything was okay. They kiss and John carries them to where the sound proof room is, but on the way, the baby starts to cry and the fireworks are gone. John begins to run, and they make it into the sound proof room, but we can still hear the monster tearing everything apart upstairs.

Meanwhile the girl wakes up from where she was sleeping next to her brothers grave, and we see her other brother start running from creatures as he face plants into the side of a tractor. His sister finds him and when she gets close we see a monster come up behind her, she can’t hear it, and then suddenly her hearing aid makes a frequency that scares away the monster, but she didn’t know what it was. The mom wakes up and John sets out to find their other two children. In the room above their sound proof area, we see there’s water gushing onto the floor. At this point everyone let go of their breath and we were like, “Come on! Let them catch a break!”

The children stand on top of their family watchtower and wait to see if their father is going to return for them, since that was the plan. The daughter wants to leave but her brother insists that she is wrong and that he is coming. When he does that, he falls through the tower, which was really a silo filled with loud, loud, food particles. The daughter jumps down, and they keep each other from being sucked under.

Back in the house the mother wakes up and realized the sound proof room is now flooded and that there is a monster inside. I swear everyones heart was in their throat and you could hear several worried whispers of, “Where’s the baby?!” She grabs the infant, who is safe, and the monster gets closer and closer. She hides behind the waters entry point, which masks the sounds of the baby’s whimpers. Due to the noise, the children are making it leave and head towards them. The mom and baby are safe, but now it’s after the children. However once again, the hearing aid frequencies scare it off. They leave the silo and since the father followed the sound, they were reunited, but it doesn’t end there.

Even though they are no longer making any noise, the monsters still follow them. Emily Blunt watches from their camera room with the baby in tow. The father has the children hide in a nearby old truck, and he grabs an axe to fend off the monsters. One appears above him, but when he takes a swing, it slices into his side and rag dolls him through the air.

Unfortunately the son, who is not smart, climbs in the truck and yells for his dad, making the monster come for the kids. As the monster gets closer and closer, the girl’s hearing aid goes more and more high pitched, being unable to bear it, she turns it off. At this point in the movie we let go of the breath we had been holding, again, and someone said, “Turn it back on!”

Alas, she doesn’t. Instead the monster begins to wildly attack the truck and John gets back up, letting the axe fall to the ground. He tells his kids that he loves them in sign language, and that he has always loved them, and then he screams.

As you can guess, no more dad. The children let the truck roll down the hill back to their house where their mother is waiting with a shotgun. They hug and cry, but they don’t have long to wait, because they hear another one coming their way. They hide back down in the basement, but one quickly begins its desecnt. Emily Blunt’s fear but determination to save her children, even though she had just given birth, is so fierce and well portrayed.

The monster begins to get closer, but the TV screens where they were monitoring everything, begin to go to static and it agitates the monster. The girl, looking at her fathers' notes, her hearing aid seems to have it click in her head. She unplugs the headphones from his radio and puts her hearing aid against it and turns it on. Instantly the monster seems to be getting frequency overload and it collapses. Thinking they’ve won, the girl looks away. The mom notices as it gets back up, and without thinking twice, she shoots it in the face. However, their small victory comes with a price. On the monitors they see lots of monsters are heading their way, several of them. The last scene has the girl turning the radio’s volume all the way up, and the mom pumping her shot gun.

That’s the whole movie, and it was a complete ride for me. The friends I was with were jumping every time any noise was made at all in the theater, and that’s why I say it’s not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot to get me scared, and it wasn’t so much a horror film as it was a suspense thriller, where I felt like if I breathed too loud, these characters would get hurt. John Krasinski, the director and father in this movie, was absolutely amazing, in his role and with his decisions.

He wanted to have a deaf actress, because he wanted to make the movie seem more real, and to creatively incorporate more people from the deaf community. It worked, because at one point, my friend was like, "oh she’s deaf," and I was like, "yeah, duh," but it only makes this even cooler. You have to think, would this family be able to survive as well as they have if they didn’t have a deaf daughter? They knew sign language, because of her, and due to the fathers work with her hearing aids, they were able to find a weakness to the monsters.

Around that they were able to do all sorts of things collectively, like chores, gather supplies, and even have a fun game of monopoly. The family works incredible well as a unit, minus the youngest son who doesn’t listen and then pays the price for it. They also aren’t perfect, they have that same kind of family tension, with a rebellious teenage daughter and a middle son, who is terrified of everything.

Overall, I’d give the movie 4.4 out of 5 stars. The reason being, even though the acting and suspense scenes were amazing there were also a couple parts I was concerned about. If the river is so loud, why don’t they live closer to it, to avoid the monsters hearing them, so that if they did make noise, they wouldn’t be caught. Surely, somewhere there’s a house nearby. Also when John lights a fire and then several fires go up around in the woods, are those other people? If so, why do they not all work together? My final concern was about the fact that Emily Blunt’s character gets pregnant. John, now I know that you love your wife, but I’m sure in this dystopian world, condoms are still on the shelf, and if not, could you just not? Also why would you in the first place, knowing you have to be quiet? It just really baffles me. Other than those few minuscule concerns of mine, I was pleasantly pleased with this movie and highly recommend seeing it at some point.