Josh Krasinski’s A Quiet Place hit me hard. Walking out the cinema, I felt blissful relief, not only at having watched a great movie, but that the ordeal was over. I wouldn’t describe the movie as a horror, but a particularly effective thriller, one that doesn’t allow its audience to relax for a moment. And speaking as a parent, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that captures the horror of child-rearing so effectively on-screen.
Mild Spoilers Ahead
There’s something undeniably appealing about post-apocalyptic narratives; Will Smith scavenging the empty streets of New York with his loyal dog looks like a dangerous and lonely life, but also strangely picturesque.
A lone gunslinger exploring the decaying ruins of a once-great civilization is a bit of an escapist fantasy, as romantic as it is nightmarish. But add a pregnant wife and young children into the mix, and the romance instantly evaporates, leaving only the nightmare.
Because children are, to be perfectly frank, really bad at staying alive. If you don’t have kids, then imagine guiding a comically inept non-player character through the most difficult level of a video game, except the game is ”everyday life” and your kid doesn’t have a generous health bar.
The almost amusingly horrific aspect of A Quiet Place isn’t just the fact that a large family is devoid of a societal safety net, but the urgent need for constant, absolute silence. The creatures that terrorize the family seem to have evolved only to listen, run, and eat. That’s a terrifying concept – most of us would be dead after a single sneeze, but adding children to the mix ramps up the tension to an unbearable degree.
Any parent foolish enough to fly on a commercial airline with young children, or even attempting to enjoy a meal in a restaurant, can attest to the fact that, despite your best efforts, children will make noise. It simply can’t be helped. It’s like a natural law of the universe, as inescapable as gravity.
And the film acknowledges this at the beginning. The moment we see the youngest member of the family pick up some loud, annoying toy, stress floods the immune system, and never relents. It’s clear that this group of people is never, ever going to be safe.
Thus, the little slip-ups, the inevitable mistakes the children make feel gut-wrenchingly inevitable, and anxiety-inducing. I wanted to scream at the characters to go and live beside the waterfall for the rest of the movie so I could relax.
Having a baby is a joyful, transcendent experience. But it’s also utterly terrifying, because it means being gripped by the cold hand of existential dread, the terrible fear that something might happen to that little helpless thing you love so much.
When Emily Blunt’s character was revealed to be pregnant, there were audible gasps in the cinema. When she endured what was undoubtedly the most stressful labor in human history, my wife practically fainted in her seat.
Hollywood often utilizes the “avenging parent” trope, the “I’m doing this badass, action-packed murder-spree for my kids,” but it rarely captures the crippling anxiety of being responsible for a small, helpless, and woefully inept human.
And that’s where A Quiet Place triumphs; for a high-concept sci-fi, it feels oddly relatable. The most memorable threat isn’t the murderous creatures, but a misplaced nail on the stairs. Watching the parents creeping around their house, desperately avoiding creaky floorboards, is akin to navigating to the bathroom without waking sleeping children.
With minimal dialogue, and only a vague hint of backstory, we’re fully invested in this scenario and the predicament these characters find themselves in. The major problem with so many horror films is a lack of emotional investment in the characters - too often, you simply don’t care that they’re being picked off one at a time, but in A Quiet Place, you feel genuinely angry when they make mistakes.
So if you’re a parent, you need to go and see A Quiet Place, if only to appreciate the fact that you live in a world where your kid can scream their lungs out, and the worst consequence will be nothing more than a dirty look from a stranger.
