Why A Quiet Place Forces Audiences To Be More Silent Than Other Movies

WARNING: Spoilers For A Quiet Place Part 2

A Quiet Place and its sequel force audiences to remain silent in a way that other movie series don’t. Like its predecessor, A Quiet Place Part 2 lives up to its title with the characters surviving in a post-apocalyptic world trying to keep the voices and any other noise down to escape detection from the monstrous alien creatures who hunt by sound. The gimmick of the two evenly-matched Quiet Place movies also has a silencing effect on its audience that one might not expect.

The theater experience for either Quiet Place is noticeably more hushed than for most movies, and that’s because the concept of the series forces audiences to keep silent as much as the characters on screen do. For the Abbot family and other survivors, keeping quiet is literally a matter of life and death. In the world they inhabit, even stepping on a twig in the woods could lead to one’s violent demise. Because of that, the Quiet Place movies have comparatively little dialogue, and what lines are spoken are largely said in a whisper.

By structuring the movies in such a way as to be semi-silent films, director John Krasinski, who risked his marriage on a stunt, also forces the audiences to keep unusually quiet for a different reason. Because the dialogue is mostly whispered, even low murmurs among audience members sitting next to each other can be enough to distract from what’s happening. To pick up on every line and plot point, viewers are forced to reflexively treat the theater itself more like a library, keeping as quiet as possible so as to not miss anything.

The Quiet Place movies themselves also gain a second benefit that works in their favor from this. Because the audience is aware that the characters are staying silent in order to avoid being hunted and killed by the monsters, the suspense of both movies is heightened significantly. As characters duck and hide from their alien monster predators, the silence they adopt leaves viewers on tenterhooks, waiting for a cell phone to ring or a battery-powered toy to activate. When that inevitably happens, the life of anyone in the immediate area is on the line, with the audience conditioned by both films to react to that horrifying scenario accordingly.

A Quiet Place Part 2 pulls another trick out of its hat by having Emmett and Regan arrive on an island where a cluster of humans have been able to survive without staying quiet, as the creatures cannot swim. That is until Emmett realizes that one of them has arrived on the island aboard an adrift boat. At that point, the normalcy he, Regan, and the audience briefly think they’ve found comes crashing down in the same kind of calamity as Chief Brody frantically trying to get swimmers out of the water in Jaws.

Ultimately, the title of the A Quiet Place series has a double meaning. For the Abbot family and the other humans who have survived the apocalypse, their lives literally depend upon staying quiet. For the audiences in attendance, staying far quieter than they would in most theater experiences is simply a matter of allowing the movie to fully give them their money’s worth.

About The Author

Brad Curran
(725 Articles Published)

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Growing up, Brad developed an innate love of movies and storytelling, and was instantly enamored with the world of adventure while following the exploits of Indiana Jones, Japanese kaiju, and superheroes. Today, Brad channels his thoughts on all manner of movies, from comic book films, sci-fi thrillers, comedies, and everything in between through his writings on Screen Rant. Brad also offers philosophical musings on martial arts and the filmographies of everyone from Jackie Chan to Donnie Yen on Kung Fu Kingdom, where he’s also had the privilege of interviewing many of the world’s great stunt professionals, and hearing plenty of gripping stories on injuries incurred in their line of work and the intricacies of designing the acts of death defiance he first thrilled to as a youngster. When he’s not writing, Brad enjoys going on a ride with the latest action hit or Netflix original, though he’s also known to just pop in “The Room” from time to time. Follow Brad on Twitter @BradCurran.

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