Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Has what you want from a horror film and not much else. Very effective at that, though.

There are so many holes and so many random chance moments in “A Quiet Place” that you should see, but the movie throws you right into the action and then turns the knob to 11 and then ends so quickly that you think you actually saw a good movie. It’s not until afterwards when you think about what you just saw that you realize you’ve been duped, but duped in the same way a magician makes you believe he sawed his assistant in half. You know how the trick works, but you fell for it anyway.

The premise of “A Quiet Place” is terrific. Monsters came from who cares where. They’ve decimated the population of Earth. They hunt by sound alone. You must always be quiet. This allows director and star John Krasinski to use silence and noise interchangeably in inventive ways that really ratchet up the tension and make for fun scary moments. The movie follows the Abbott family, one of the few survivors, as they continue to make due in this new and scary world. In another awesome tactic, daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf, which adds another layer to the silence. (As an aside, I learned that Millicent Simmonds is actually deaf which makes it doubly awesome! She plays a great angsty teenager.)

The movie spans hundreds of days, but almost all of the action occurs over about one day during the horror cliche I like to call “the day you’d rather forget”. This “day you’d rather forget” is quick and fun and absolutely ridiculous if you had any time whatsoever to think about it. Good news is you don’t. Any sort of thought and you’ll realize that the system that they have devised to guard against the monsters makes no sense and the way to defeat the monsters makes even less sense. Yes, I know it’s impossible to make less than no sense, but this movie does it somehow.

“A Quiet Place” is a fun, empty horror film and sometimes that’s exactly what you want. It comes up with some inventive ways to scare you, which is commendable. It breaks a little bit of new ground, but is still, at it’s bloody ripped out heart, a horror film. You will enjoy it if you like the genre. You will not if you don’t.