The Silently Regressive Politics of “A Quiet

Place”
By Richard Brody

April 10, 2018

The success of “A Quiet Place,” the new horror thriller directed by John Krasinski, is a sign of
viewers craving emptiness, of a yearning for some cinematic white noise to drown out troubling
thoughts and observations with a potently simple and high-impact countermyth. The noise of “A
Quiet Place” is the whitest since the release of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; as
horror films go, it’s the antithesis of “Get Out,” inasmuch as its symbolic realm is both
apparently unconscious and conspicuously regressive.

“A Quiet Place” is the story of a white family living in rustic isolation that’s reduced to silence
because a bunch of big, dark, stealthy, predatory creatures who can hear their every noise are
marauding in the woods and, at any conspicuous sound, will emerge as if from nowhere and
instantly maul them to death. I won’t spoil the plot twists, but Krasinski ultimately delivers a pair
of exemplary images, a lone bearded man (whom he himself plays) with a rifle, and a lone
woman (played by his real-life wife, Emily Blunt) aiming a rifle into the camera.
The movie is a fantasy of survivalism that starts eighty-nine days into the rampage. The Abbotts,
a family of five—mother, Evelyn; father, Lee; Regan, a daughter of about eleven (Millicent
Simmonds); Marcus, a son of about eight (Noah Jupe), and a small boy of about four named
Beau (Cade Woodward)—are trawling a ghost city for supplies, wandering through a pharmacy
and gathering medicine. (The characters’ first names are given on IMDb, though, to the best of
my recollection, they’re not mentioned in the film itself.) The Abbotts are the only people
making their way through town, across an old wooden bridge, and to their remote country
farmhouse amid a series of other farms. If they’ve survived so far—and most of the action takes
place later, more than a year into the invasion—it’s due in part to one circumstance: Regan is
deaf (as Simmonds is in real life), and, as a result, the family is skilled in sign language, which
enables them to communicate and strategize while eluding the monsters

Except for its blaring music, “A Quiet Place” is in fact mostly a very quiet movie (with one
clever, if obvious, element of sound design—shots suggesting Regan’s point of view remove all
background sound and are delivered silent, to reproduce her deafness on the soundtrack and
contrast it with the hearing of other characters and the enforced speechlessness of their
environment). The farmhouse, however, has been the site of relentless labors—both the daily
domestic work on which physical subsistence depends (the action suggests that Evelyn does
most of that) and some high-tech wizardry that turns the family’s basement into an elaborate
video-surveillance module, with cameras scattered throughout the wide property, more video
screens at work than in the back room of a shopping mall, and strings of red lights that wind
through the farmland and can be lit at the flip of a switch. (Scenes of Lee at work with wire and
solder suggest that the electronics workshop is solely his domain.)

The Abbotts have to maintain their quiet (though Lee has discovered that, when there’s a big and
steady sound nearby, such as the rush of a waterfall, it’s safe to speak, since the voices don’t
escape it), and so, there’s almost no verbal dialogue in the film (there’s more dialogue in sign
language, which is subtitled). The near-wordless soundtrack is a directorial choice on Krasinski’s
part—as silent as its characters may be, “A Quiet Place” could easily have been transformed into
a voluble movie, in which the characters’ thoughts and experiences would be delivered on the
soundtrack, as interior monologues, even if they’re compelled not to express them aloud to each
other. But Krasinski (who wrote the script with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) chose to keep his
characters blank and undefined, their memories and musings out of bounds. What dialogue there
is (whether spoken or signed) is confined to the demands of the action (with one twist of
psychology involving an element of guilt that figures only trivially in the plot).

The only moment of authentic inner expression, the acknowledgment of any identity at all, arises
when, under siege from the creatures, Evelyn challenges Lee when their children are in danger:
“Who are we? Who are we if we can’t protect them?” In that moment, “A Quiet Place” disgorges
its entire stifled and impacted ideological content. The movie’s survivalist horror-fantasy offers
the argument for turning a rustic farmhouse into a virtual fortress, for the video surveillance and
the emergency lighting and, above all, the stash of firearms that (along with a bit of high-tech
trickery that is too good to spoil) is the ultimate game changer, the ultimate and decisive defense
against home intruders.
In effect, “A Quiet Place” is an oblivious, unself-conscious version of Clint Eastwood’s recent
movies, such as “The 15:17 to Paris,” which bring to the fore the idealistic elements of gun
culture while dramatizing the tragic implications that inevitably shadow that idealism. The one
sole avowed identity of the Abbott parents is as their children’s defenders; their more obvious
public identity is as a white rural family. The only other people in the film, who are more
vulnerable to the marauding creatures, are white as well. In their enforced silence, these
characters are a metaphorical silent—white—majority, one that doesn’t dare to speak freely for
fear of being heard by the super-sensitive ears of the dark others. It’s significant that when
characters—two white men—commit suicide-by-noisemaking, they do so by howling as if with
rage, rather than by screeching or singing or shouting words of love to their families. (Those
death bellows are the wordless equivalent of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this
anymore!”) Whether the Abbotts’ insular, armed way of life might put them into conflict with
other American families of other identities is the unacknowledged question hanging over “A
Quiet Place,” the silent horror to which the movie doesn’t give voice.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He writes about movies in his blog,
The Front Row. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc
Godard.”
John Krasinski Responds to Critic Who
Slammed ‘A Quiet Place’ As Socially
Regressive
Richard Brody's review of "A Quiet Place" in The New Yorker compared it to the
whiteness of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

Zack Sharf

Feb 20, 2020 3:24 pm

John Krasinki’s “A Quiet Place” received near unanimous acclaim when it opened in theaters
nationwide in April 2018 (the film boasts an impressive 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from
364 reviews), but one critic who panned the movie was Richard Brody of The New Yorker.
Brody’s review of the movie was titled “The Silently Regressive Politics of ‘A Quiet Place'” and
claimed Krasinski’s horror film had the whitest voice in film since the release of Martin
McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” the year prior. “As horror films go,
it’s the antithesis of ‘Get Out,'” Brody wrote, “inasmuch as its symbolic realm is both apparently
unconscious and conspicuously regressive.” The review criticized “A Quiet Place” for its central
narrative about a white family with guns protecting their home from “a bunch of big, dark,
stealthy, predatory creatures.”

Brody’s “A Quiet Place” review came to Krasinski’s attention while being interviewed for an
Esquire profile, and the writer-director maintained that he was not trying to make any kind of
political statement with “A Quiet Place.” The film was written as a metaphor for parenthood.
While Krasinski and Brody have different understandings of the narrative, the director said he’s
not one to undervalue other perspectives of his work.

“I never saw it that way or ever thought of it until it was presented to me in that way,” Krasinski
said of Brody’s review. “It wasn’t about being, you know, silent and political time that had
nothing to do with that. If anything it was about, you know, going into the dark and, and taking a
chance when all hope looked lost, you take, you know, you fight for what’s most important to
you. Again, my whole metaphor was solely about parenthood.”

Krasinski describes his “A Quiet Place” script as being “about parenthood and the promise that
you make to your kids that I’ll keep you safe no matter what — that’s inevitably a false
promise.” As for the upcoming sequel, Krasinski adds, “The second one is about that promise
being broken and it’s about growing up and it’s about moving on and dealing with loss. For me
this whole movie becomes about community. It’s about who do you trust in dark times and the
power of relying on other people in dark times.”

Paramount Pictures is releasing “A Quiet Place Part II” in theaters nationwide March 20. Head
over to Esquire’s website to read Krasinski’s profile in its entirety.