A Quiet Place

John Krasinski’s directorial debut is a stunning horror film with a heart. 

His family of survivors must live in silence to avoid attracting the Alien-breed monster. The tension is so concentrated and relentless that the audience feels as edgy and threatened as the characters.

In this post-apocalypse world, mankind manages to sustain itself. If one son is killed for a noisy toy, another is born. His mother smothers her contractions under the monster’s ear.   
     Daughter Regan feels guilty for having given her young brother the fatal toy. She redeems herself, first by saving other brother Marcus from drowning in a granary, then by bringing down the monster. She discovers the beast is sensitive to the sound — the opposite to her deafness — so she ratchets up the sound waves to stun him. Mother Evelyn finishes him off.

The film speaks to our moment in a couple of respects. The father, Lee, is the usual Krasinski sensitive man. He’s careful to raise Marcus to self-sufficiency and dedicates himself to trying to make Regan an effective hearing aid. Still, he needs Marcus to remind him how desperate Regan is to hear her father still loves her, after her unwitting part in her brother’s death.

The film thwarts the genre expectation by granting the women the final victory. As he signs his love to Regan, Lee sacrifices himself to distract the monster from his children. For her part, Evelyn dumbly stares down the beast to deliver and preserve her baby and then guns it down.

Evelyn has one line which may directly address contemporary America. As she and Lee worry about their missing Regan and Marcus, she feels responsible for not having carried the son who was killed.  As she cites the parents’ responsibility to protect their children — Every generation’s responsibility to protect and provide for the next — she pitches the film at the GOP presidency all too eager to sacrifice the nation’s future for its present profit: “Who are we if we can't protect them? we have to protect them.”  

Tell that to Trump’s EPA and Education directors — and his NRA. Krasinski just did.