A Quiet Place (2018)

This sleeper hit about a scary future where a family's survival depends on aliens not hearing them is powerful and worth the hype. We liked it a lot. John Krasinski directs and co-wrote, as well as stars with his real-life wife Emily Blunt (he was last blogged for directing in The Hollars, for co-writing in Promised Land, and for acting in Detroit, and she for acting in Sicario). Two of their children are played by Noah Jupe (he was in Suburbicon) and Millicent Simmonds (deaf in real life, she played a deaf girl in Wonderstruck). Co-writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck are new to me but not to the business.

Little dialogue is spoken--the characters use American Sign Language, with subtitles for the unschooled, to communicate through most of it, but the movie isn't entirely silent. Ironically, the most frightening scenes are punched up by music cues and sound editing. Here's an anecdote: as a film student in the early 1980s, I was privileged to attend a cast and crew screening of Poltergeist. I heard later that the sound editors were pleased at the audience's audible reactions to their carefully placed noises.

The aforementioned music is thanks to Marco Beltrami (last blogged for Logan) and can be streamed from this playlist. There is only one song, Neil Young's romantic Harvest Moon.

A groundbreaking phenomenon, it opened at #1 its first weekend, is holding steady at the top, and has the fifth biggest total gross of all the movies playing right now, due, no doubt, in part to its critics' average of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences at 85.