This was one of those times that I felt like I knew enough just from the trailer, with a couple extra details from a review or two. It's certainly simple in concept. I also postponed my viewing in the off chance that I found it too scary for comfort. But one of the few genuinely promising horrors on my queue could not be ignored all month.
The cast is quite small, because few people or animals are left alive by late 2020. For months, a blind but excellently hearing species has been annihilating and, I assume, devouring them. Our focus is on a single family living in a rural area, making trips to an abandoned town as needed. So great is their dread of attracting monsters that they rarely even whisper, opting for sign language and going barefoot everywhere. And lest you think that the plot amounts to a now-typical couple of days in their lives, the mother (Emily Blunt, actual wife of costar and director John Krasinski) is heavily pregnant....
Yes, they plan to keep the baby. I found myself suspecting that they would slit his or her vocal cords. And before that point, there's the challenge of birthing without screaming too loud. Not since Rosemary's Baby have I seen so effective a way to ratchet up the already intense experience.
A subplot involves the teen daughter (actually deaf Millicent Simmonds), who hasn't heard a sound in a long time. This might have given the family an advantage in learning ASL ahead of time, but it's still an overall disadvantage for survival. She's lost faith both in her father's attempts to make a functional cochlear implant and in his love for her. Her younger brother (Noah Jupe) notices the latter issue.
Given the post-apocalyptic scenario, I was inclined to feel more sorrow than fear. Who wants to live in a world where you can't laugh or cry audibly? By halfway through, I was changing my mind: There's still something worth clinging to. And not knowing whether the family would perish, find a new cause for hope, or keep living as they had been, I could worry. Without saying which, I can warn you that not everyone we see alive remains so.
Viewers might disagree on whether the monsters are scarier before or after we get a good look at them. I was not surprised to learn that their CG design was one of the final steps in the filmmaking. The effects are not quite state-of-the-art, but at least they look as alien as Xenomorphs. Count me in the "after" camp. Either way, tho, you have to brace yourself for jump scares.
You may wonder how these creatures could be so successful against humanity when they have trouble detecting a panting human ten feet away and are dumb enough to go after whatever object last made noise. Well, their main advantage is bulletproof natural armor, followed by steel-puncturing strength and impressive speed. Even so, I know some militants who'd probably insist that we'd never be reduced to living in silence; we would surely find our killers' weakness and draw them into a fight or trap. When the movie does reveal their weakness, it's not as lame as in Signs, but IMDb still deems it a plot hole.
I don't let the less credible details stand in the way of my appreciation of an effectively affective piece. Above all, AQP encourages us to imagine a very different yet logical and adequately familiar lifestyle. It helps that the characters never say each others' names, so we can easily insert ourselves in their (quiet) place. Who knows; maybe I'll have insomnia tonight.
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