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They all look normal enough, except that everyone is barefoot, and remains so throughout the film, and they communicate in sign language.Īll appears stable until the younger son (Cade Woodward) makes the mistake of playing with a battery-powered airplane toy. But poking around the shadowy crannies of an empty grocery store is a family: Krasinski, the noble bearded father, and his wife, played by Emily Blunt (Krasinski and Blunt are married in real life), along with their three children. A picturesque main street in upstate New York has been abandoned - the eerie, bombed-out vibe is pure zombie-movie dystopia. It opens on Day 89 of a mysterious invasion. (Why is it that a crashing waterfall can mask any telltale sound, but when the family is behind the walls of their farmhouse, even their whispers risk being heard?) Yet sometimes, getting on the clever/whatever wavelength of a horror film and just rolling with can be a part of the fun. The more you look at it, though, the more you see that “A Quiet Place” is at once catchy and contrived, ingenious and arbitrary. The film generates a free-floating dread out of the fact that almost every sound a character makes is potentially deadly. “A Quiet Place” is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.
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