A Keaton Review: A Quiet Place
By: Keaton Marcus
Genre/Horror/Thriller
Age Rating/13+
Lemonradar/92% sweet
So What’s The Story?
Hi, this is Keaton Marcus from Sweet and Sour Movie Reviews and today I will be reviewing Emily Blunt and John Krasinski’s newest collaboration, Horror film, A Quiet Place. When unusual creatures crash and take over Earth, a family in modern time, Evelyn Abbott, Lee Abbott and their three children find out that they are blind and cannot touch or feel, however they have a very, very keen sense of hearing meaning the five people must live in complete silence for life; Can they make it out alive, or will it be too late, for all of them.
How Was The Cast?
One of the few Horror flicks, PG-13 rated at most that has two well-known actors to reprise main characters, in A Quiet Place we saw Emily Blunt take on pregnant and worried-for-her-children sort-of mother Evelyn Abbott, and John Krasinski (Blunt’s husband in real life) perform caring, strong, brave and protecting dad Lee Abbott; For the two children, playing Regan Abbott, the deaf daughter is Millicent Simmonds and playing worryful son Marcus Abbott is Noah Jupe. Like I said Blunt known for Edge of Tomorrow, The Devil Wears Prada, The Girl on the Train etc. playing Evelyn Abbott. Coping with the imminent silence of the film using sign language, this brilliant movie quietly and smoothly formed around the main characters, but evolving the main twist on Blunt’s character, the pregnancy (how can you keep a baby quiet?), actress Emily Blunt cooly plays a protective mother with an amazing narrative, a graphic but magnificently directed birth scene and overall you could feel Blunt with you in the theater as you were biting your shirt, waiting for the next scare. John Krasinski known for Detroit, Arrested Development and The Office both starred and directed in this film, and being Blunt’s husband in real life, Krasinski was able to play an amazingly real Lee Abbott collaborating former talent from other films and TV bringing them on the screen for his newest movie; With many internal and external conflicts burying Lee Abbott, this character is not only one of the best directed and scripted of all time, but surprisingly Mr. Krasinski has now proved that he can perform many different kinds of characters in many different scattered types of genres. Creating more and more twists in the film is Lee and Evelyn’s daughter, Regan Abbott who plays a very important part in the film and ultimately saves the day finding the creatures’ weakness played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds. While going through all these character obstacles Simmons thoroughly crafts a well-developed, extremely real type of person without making Regan Abbott too boring to follow, opposite actually Regan was out of the five characters one of the most interesting to follow; Meaning she was the smartest protagonist in the entire span of the movie, carrying a huge plot twist and amazing, clever personal obstacles. Lastly the fourth main character is Marcus Abbott played by actor Noah Jupe known for Wonder, The Titan and Downton Abbey has showed many, many good performances in most of his movies and hit TV shows showing an extremely young, but very talented actor, for A Quiet Place Jupe went above and beyond taking characterization into new levels and being one of the little of 2018’s small characters to turn into big roles just during the movie; Playing out an interesting character story and an internal connection with Lee Abbott (Krasinski) for the entire film, this wonderfully successful actor succeeds massively.
Is It Worth Your While?
Directing and starring in A Quiet Place as I told you before is John Krasinski known for creating Hollars as his only directed movie, not having any experience for Horror and the shaky genre it is, Krasinski was a very, very risky choice. However the director proved me wrong, Krasinski crafted a brilliantly tense, scary and very, very unusually real and believable 90-minute Horror; Without making anything too bloated or talky filmmaker John Krasinski also gave each main character personal stories, conflicts and many other things along the way. Despite just setting a high-bar for Horror flicks in general, it also lit-up the PG-13 Thrillers genre which was very, very surprising and exciting to see, developing a true experience director John Krasinski has created his one perfect film so far with amazing character development, a smart scary story and a creative dystopian-type setting. The film also had a scatter of art, and low-budget but realistic special effects, considering the creature-feature genre (Van Helsing, Pacific Rim, Alien etc.) they all have enormous production budgets, A Quiet Place, the newest installment to that particular genre is just standing at an extremely low 17 million which is perhaps the smallest production for the genre. However the special-effects crew and team manage to create a just as real, scary visually impressive short-creature/Horror flick without spending too much money; While CGI and effects are not this movie’s game, they still spend a good amount of time on perfecting every single element of the film making it just as viscerally scary or even more as other flicks of the genre. Story and plot wise, the main conflict is mostly finding out the monster/alien’s weakness which is turned towards the deaf daughter, Regan Abbott (Millicent Simmonds) who creatively and smartly finds a way to defeat them. Though did the crew execute it well? The simple answer would obviously be a big, fat yes; Krasinski and the crew of A Quiet Place created a genius plot and story almost completely out of scratch, making a short, dark and very, very tense and suspenseful creature-feature. Relating to real life problems (the mouse and it’s predators), the film slowly and creepily edged the twists around the audience making them hide their faces every dark turn they pass during the 1 hr 30 mins of the movie.
Aging ‘Silence’
Though mainly A Quiet Place did turn out has a very scary and real Horror flick, it did not push too much out of the limits of its PG-13 MPAA rating with some shocking moments of violence, no bad uses of language whatsoever (like most scary films) and one graphic scene having to do with sexuality. Violence wise, there are some minor jumpscares including a blood spurt, a bloody hand on the shower wall, a man commits suicide by screaming and letting the monsters grab him, there is two meaningful deaths of main characters, the showing of an aftermath of a woman torn in half by the creatures and a bear foot stepped on a very sharp nail with little blood spills. Characters communicate via American sign-language which does not show any sense or form of bad language despite the common argues of family members. Sexuality wise, there is no actual nudity or “sex scenes”, but there is a very tense and minorly graphic birth scene with blood pooling in the bathtub but is mostly shown off-camera.
Creature-Feature Smackdown
A Quiet Place 100% sweet
Violence: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Sex: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆
Language: ☆☆☆☆☆
Age Rating: 13+
Cloverfield 95% sweet
Violence: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sex: ⭐⭐☆☆☆
Language: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆
Age Rating: 14+
A Quiet Place 100% sweet
Storyline: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Cast: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Role Models: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Cloverfield 95% sweet
Storyline: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Cast: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Role Models: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆
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