John Krasinski, the average Joe on television's "The Office" for years, has blossomed into a serious player. Besides directing the film and co-writing the script, he shares star billing with his real-life wife, British actress Emily Blunt. Mom, Dad and their three kids -- oops, now two kids -- struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where hideous (and I do mean hideous), blind monsters roam the landscape, triggered by sound. Hence the title, since if you make any noise you are instantly dead meat.
Krasinski cleverly borrows memorable scenes from several other popular movies that made it big. There's the one where the two kids trapped inside a car are being attacked by the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. There's the one where someone gets slowly buried in corn inside a silo from Witness. There are whole scenes from Mel Gibson's Signs, and in fact the monsters might be those guys' cousins: skinny, long-limbed and really, really slimy. The way our heroes figure out how to ultimately destroy the enemy is straight out of Mars Attacks, while the premise of normal life gone awry mimics the feel of the recent hit Get Out.
Now here's the dumb stuff:
1. I was particularly mystified at how the mother gave birth to a healthy baby, soundlessly and alone in a bathtub, without screaming during her contractions, which lasted about twenty minutes, unlike mine that went on for 23 hours. Wow, those breathing exercises really worked for her! No clue as to how she cut the umbilical cord. (Details, details.) The newly-arrived infant whimpered a few times, but that was it -- nothing loud enough to trigger any monsters.
2. Old newspapers tacked up on a wall show headlines about death and destruction worldwide, but there's still plenty of electricity to run the dozen TV screens and security cameras that Dad, clearly a scientific genius even though he's a farmer, has rigged up. How is that possible? Where is it coming from? Who is running it? Aren't those generators noisy?
3. There are rows and rows of corn for hiding in, but as my husband pointed out, corn is an annual crop. If the monsters arrived almost two years ago, how did that corn get planted without a tractor making a lot of noise? (Details, details.)
4. Out of nowhere water begins pouring into the basement of the farmhouse where the Mom is hiding out, quickly rising dangerously close to the makeshift crib and its infant occupant. Suddenly one of the monsters pops up, and Mom has to hide from it while keeping the baby quiet. The scene ends and we never know where that water was coming from; after all, it's not even raining! (My husband thinks he saw a running hose somewhere; possibly it was one of the times I had my eyes covered.)
5. Mom steps on a rusty nail but can't scream, natch. In a gruesome close-up, we see the nail go ALL THE WAY INTO HER FOOT! But she just pulls it out and there's a little blood, and lah-de-dah, that's it. No tetanus or anything. (You'd think she'd limp for a few days.)
6. On an existential level, why try to stay alive under such circumstances? It's not like the kids will grow up and go to Disneyland and college and find good jobs and get married, etc. There's definitely not gonna be Christmas. The future looks grim, and that's on a good day.
Still, it's a great yarn that will keep you riveted -- and quiet. When we saw it, nobody in the theater even touched their popcorn. And what surely will please those politically-correct lefties is the underlying message about the loneliness of being deaf in a hearing world, since the fictional deaf daughter is played by a deaf actress, so everyone communicates through sign language. When we got home Mitch and I thoroughly checked the house for monsters, then cooked up a big batch of popcorn and proceeded to chew it loudly and with abandon.
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