A Quiet Place; a Call to the Death
Before You Watch
If you watched “The Silence” (2019), you would find some similarities in “A Quiet Place” (2108). In both movies, hideous blind creatures hunt humans and other animals by using their super-sensitive ears. Making a noise means a call to death.
After You Watched
“A Quiet Place” happens in the same atmosphere of almost all post-apocalyptic world. Humans have moved backward and can’t use any of the innovations of past centuries. They live in fear and feel defenseless against new animals that placed themselves at the top of the food chain.
Interestingly, one of the main advantages of humans compared to other creatures was the ability to communicate at a higher level. Speaking and language were the mediums of collective learning that made it possible to transfer knowledge through the generations.
But in “A Quiet Place” and “The Silence”, the ability of speaking leads humans to death. They have to keep quiet to survive. Even in “Silence”, the creepy priest convinces people to cut their throat vocal cords to be mute forever. Like all religious communities, he and his followers try to force people to follow their rules, even though there is no holy goal in their minds.
“A Quiet Place” has a different approach to create dramatic conflicts. There is no human community to double the danger and make things more frightening. Instead, the complicated relationship between Lee Abbott and his daughter Reagan creates a hidden conflict that grows gradually by misunderstanding.
Reagan is deaf, and her condition is opposite to the blind monsters. Sounds don’t mean anything to her. Reagan’s father tries to make hearing aids for her, but none of them works properly, and one of them that works a bit, creates deafening noises.
Reagan, who gets blamed for a few mistakes and one of them leads to his younger brother’s death at the beginning of the movie, assumes that his father doesn’t love him. She breaks the rules and tries to escape from home but at the way to return, puts her family at risk.
She finally believes her father loves him when she and her brother are trapped in a car, and a monster is trying to hunt them. Lee, who sees the situation, makes some noises intentionally to distract the monster, and just before getting killed, tells Reagan in sign language that he always loved her.
“A Quiet Place” doesn’t tell us about the monsters and their origin. It seems unlike many Sci-Fi movies that describe aliens in detail, this movie uses the terrifying situation to dig into the core of the relationship between members of a family and the sacrifice they make to survive.
Even the end of the story doesn’t show a real fight between humans and predators. The only thing that saves the family is the noisy hearing aid that makes creatures crazy. It says that only an object made by love a father can save the world.
By the way, making “A Quiet Place” and “The Silence” in 2018 and 2019, just 1-2 years before the corona pandemic is an interesting coincidence. In both movies, people are living in isolation and fear. Even if the origin of the fear is different from what we see in the pandemic, the atmosphere, and the fear sound similar.
