Farouk Gulsara

A Quiet Place (2018) The movie 'Bird Box' has been compared to this film when the former was released. If in 'Bird Box' the visual apparatus was the weak link, here any kind of sound is the stimuli that agitate the beast. At the slight presence of noise, a creature which looks like the one discarded from the set of the ‘Alien' franchise appears from nowhere to swallow the propagator. As viewers can see later, high-decibel acoustics turned out to be its Achilles’ heel after all. The viewers are left in the dark on how it all started but what we are told is that nobody is supposed to make any noise. We end up watching another silent movie without intertitles. There is an option, however, for subtitles for ASL (American Sign Language) as it is used in the film. Even though all the film critics seem to sing only praises for the film, I was left feeling disappointed. Nothing much really happens in this movie. A family runs for their home as their youngest child is killed by the beast for playing with screeching toy plane. The family (father, mother and two kids) reach their new hideout. A year after the first scene, they live in a world of silence, just communicating with each other in sign language. Their house is filled to the brim with sensors to alert them on a beast attack. Knowing very well that they have no communication with the outside world and that their lives were hanging on a thread, the mother is seen walking around with a gravid tummy. Nothing extraordinary that is not expected really happens. The rest of the story is about each member of the family wards off the creature while the mother delivers her baby after a near-death experience. The audience is left wondering what really happened, and what is the point of the movie. Maybe our romanticism with silent movies is not over.