A Quiet Place is a 2018 horror mystery thriller directed by  John Krasinski. In this world, too loud of a sound leads to your death at the claws of strange creatures with super sensitive hearing. This stripped down sound makes the quiet of the film create very loud silence.

Krasinski made the film as a metaphor of parenthood and the fear of not being able to protect his family. He also said that prior to making this film he “couldn’t even watch horror movies” which I can relate to. I believe the way he approached horror as a genre was brilliant because instead of leaning on the trop of loud noise and jumpscares; he made it the anchor of the plot and thus was done minimally compared to the typical horror film.

The film has barely any spoken dialogue or loud sound effects therefore “the quiet becomes loud and the loud becomes ear-piercing. It’s a big part of the reason the movie works as well as it does, and much of that is thanks to the work of sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn” (vox, 2018). Ironically, the sound editors were known for working on very loud movies such as Transformers and Godzilla, yet A Quiet Place was the first instance for the Oscar-nominated sound editors to be told “we heard your movie“. They explain in a video interview how “it’s pretty exciting to be involved with the project that really embraced that (Sound) in its DNA and made sounds such a leading character you know both Eric and I have worked on many many movies and a quiet place has been a little bit unique and in the sense that people have really paid attention to the sound in this movie in ways that they really haven’t in a lot of other movies that we’ve worked on and that’s super gratifying“.

One of the main characters of the film is the daughter who plays Regan, actor Millicent Simmonds who is deaf in real life. And so the sound designers capitalize on this and they sonically described to the audience her experience in all aspects of the film. In the opening of the film we see how she only was aware of the danger that her younger brother was in because of how the rest of her family reacted, but when we’re hearing the world from Regan’s perspective, it’s silent. This creates two hyper extremes at different ends of the spectrum where these creatures have hypersensitive hearing yet Regan has none showing her level of vulnerability.

All in all I remember when I watched this film in theaters it did feel weird that the sounds of crunching popcorn was louder that the film. However as the story unfolded sound became scary as I began fearing for the characters. So this film is a great example of the power and impact sound design has in the cinematic experience.

 

References

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/26/17396174/a-quiet-place-sound-design-loud.