The film is incredibly tight for a 90 minute feature, but still works slowly and methodically to set up the story and the characters that make up the surviving family members (played by John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, and Millicent Simmonds), giving us enough time to form an emotional connection to them before the true horror unfolds.

The film opens on day 68 in the wake of the post-apocalyptic disaster that we as viewers have yet to fully understand. It isn't until the family makes their trek back home after scavenging for food and supplies that we truly understand the terrors that lurk and the consequences of not staying silent. We then flash forward to day 472, where the family is struggling to cope with the tragedy that befell in the opening scene. How they deal with this traumatic event, in addition to the threat that lurks in the woods, is the primary focus in this lean and well executed monster movie.

Just as its name implies, A Quiet Place revels in silence, and only contains a handful of spoken dialogue. Instead, much of the film's dialogue is communicated via sign language accompanied by subtitles. Even then, the dialogue is sparse, and similar to westerns, the film relies on facial expressions and body language to get the points across. The use of pure silence is fantastic, and makes for some moments of pure grade-A filmmaking. At times, the use of silence even intensifies what is already an incredibly tense scene; however, while the film holds back on dialogue, it's also not entirely comfortable in its silence either. The score that plays underneath a large portion of the film is obtrusive in that typical horror way that hams on the suspense, taking away the vitality of select scenes whenever the composer queues a jump scare. However, the film's crowing feature is its sound design, which is virtuosic in every way, effectively creating a soundscape of terror that can be felt to the core.