Masterful filmic storytelling.

From the opening seconds of this fantastic horror movie, you know you’re in the hands of wonderful filmmakers.

Director John Krasinski (in his debut!), together with Charlotte Bruus Christensen‘s beautiful cinematography, Christopher Tellefsen‘s meticulous editing, and of course the sound design supervised by Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, demonstrates a fluency in the language and power of visual and aural storytelling in crafting a film that is as much a joy to watch as it is, y’know, properly terrifying.

The whole thing is just such smart, small-scale filmmaking. Its sci-fi premise works with the Jaws conceit of creating more horror by not showing the monster. It’s a small cast, and the performances are all wonderful. Every shot, every edit, every sound, is important, deliberate, riveting. Masterful.

Even the smaller moments are constructed with precise, economical blocking:

Further Viewing

To promote the film, Amazon Prime Video basically created a supercut showcasing the sound design of A Quiet Place:

Director John Krasinski is great at presenting his own work, as he does in this scene breakdown (via Vanity Fair):

Krasinski’s stories about the making of this film are beautiful – and he shares a bunch of them with fellow director Doug Liman for the DGA podcast, The Director’s Cut (which is a font of great director-on-director chats like this):

I mentioned the feeling of the film’s opening moments – and Insider effectively deconstructs the cause of that feeling and pores over its working parts:

… as does Thomas Flight, in his own breakdown of the opening scene:

Lessons From The Screenplay examines exactly how the film succeeds in Telling a Story With Sound: