To assess how far a horror movie’s chill factor is down to the sound design and score, just watch the film with your fingers in your ears – something I do far more often than I should probably admit – and see how effectively this takes the edge off the scares. While in most cases the sound is in the service to the onscreen action, the genius of this nerve-shredding thriller is that it takes centre stage. Each audible breath, each creak, adds a needle stab of anxiety to the story.
In his third feature, John Krasinski (of the US version of The Office) stars with his wife, Emily Blunt, hearing-impaired child actor Millicent Simmonds and British-born rising star Noah Jupe as a resourceful family who have so far survived the invasive predators that have hunted humanity to the brink of extinction. The fact that eldest child Regan (Simmonds) is deaf gives the family an advantage – they can communicate in sign language. The insectoid monsters who stalk the planet hunt by sound. Survival depends on silence.
The creature design department has gone all out on slavering jaws and huge quivering eardrums, but the screenplay avoids exposition; what we learn comes only from newspaper headlines and notes. By dropping us midway into a global crisis – the first chapter unfolds on day 89 – the film neatly sidesteps the question of how something that is literally all ears and appetite would have the sophisticated technology to invade Earth. And if it’s not alien, then what is it?
Origin questions aside, the film preys on our nerves every bit as efficiently as the ear monsters that stalk anything that dares make a sound. A superb sequence in a grain silo is suffocatingly taut. And the family tiptoes around the ominous fact of mother Evelyn’s pregnancy: a time bomb set to destroy their hard-won silence.
