The success of “A Quiet Place,” the new horror thriller directed by John Krasinski, is a sign of viewers craving emptiness, of a yearning for some cinematic white noise to drown out troubling thoughts and observations with a potently simple and high-impact countermyth. The noise of “A Quiet Place” is the whitest since the release of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; as horror films go, it’s the antithesis of “Get Out,” inasmuch as its symbolic realm is both apparently unconscious and conspicuously regressive.

“A Quiet Place” is the story of a white family living in rustic isolation that’s reduced to silence because a bunch of big, dark, stealthy, predatory creatures who can hear their every noise are marauding in the woods and, at any conspicuous sound, will emerge as if from nowhere and instantly maul them to death. I won’t spoil the plot twists, but Krasinski ultimately delivers a pair of exemplary images, a lone bearded man (whom he himself plays) with a rifle, and a lone woman (played by his real-life wife, Emily Blunt) aiming a rifle into the camera.

The movie is a fantasy of survivalism that starts eighty-nine days into the rampage. The Abbotts, a family of five—mother, Evelyn; father, Lee; Regan, a daughter of about eleven (Millicent Simmonds); Marcus, a son of about eight (Noah Jupe), and a small boy of about four named Beau (Cade Woodward)—are trawling a ghost city for supplies, wandering through a pharmacy and gathering medicine. (The characters’ first names are given on IMDb, though, to the best of my recollection, they’re not mentioned in the film itself.) The Abbotts are the only people making their way through town, across an old wooden bridge, and to their remote country farmhouse amid a series of other farms. If they’ve survived so far—and most of the action takes place later, more than a year into the invasion—it’s due in part to one circumstance: Regan is deaf (as Simmonds is in real life), and, as a result, the family is skilled in sign language, which enables them to communicate and strategize while eluding the monsters.

Except for its blaring music, “A Quiet Place” is in fact mostly a very quiet movie (with one clever, if obvious, element of sound design—shots suggesting Regan’s point of view remove all background sound and are delivered silent, to reproduce her deafness on the soundtrack and contrast it with the hearing of other characters and the enforced speechlessness of their environment). The farmhouse, however, has been the site of relentless labors—both the daily domestic work on which physical subsistence depends (the action suggests that Evelyn does most of that) and some high-tech wizardry that turns the family’s basement into an elaborate video-surveillance module, with cameras scattered throughout the wide property, more video screens at work than in the back room of a shopping mall, and strings of red lights that wind through the farmland and can be lit at the flip of a switch. (Scenes of Lee at work with wire and solder suggest that the electronics workshop is solely his domain.)

The Abbotts have to maintain their quiet (though Lee has discovered that, when there’s a big and steady sound nearby, such as the rush of a waterfall, it’s safe to speak, since the voices don’t escape it), and so, there’s almost no verbal dialogue in the film (there’s more dialogue in sign language, which is subtitled). The near-wordless soundtrack is a directorial choice on Krasinski’s part—as silent as its characters may be, “A Quiet Place” could easily have been transformed into a voluble movie, in which the characters’ thoughts and experiences would be delivered on the soundtrack, as interior monologues, even if they’re compelled not to express them aloud to each other. But Krasinski (who wrote the script with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) chose to keep his characters blank and undefined, their memories and musings out of bounds. What dialogue there is (whether spoken or signed) is confined to the demands of the action (with one twist of psychology involving an element of guilt that figures only trivially in the plot).

The only moment of authentic inner expression, the acknowledgment of any identity at all, arises when, under siege from the creatures, Evelyn challenges Lee when their children are in danger: “Who are we? Who are we if we can’t protect them?” In that moment, “A Quiet Place” disgorges its entire stifled and impacted ideological content. The movie’s survivalist horror-fantasy offers the argument for turning a rustic farmhouse into a virtual fortress, for the video surveillance and the emergency lighting and, above all, the stash of firearms that (along with a bit of high-tech trickery that is too good to spoil) is the ultimate game changer, the ultimate and decisive defense against home intruders.

In effect, “A Quiet Place” is an oblivious, unself-conscious version of Clint Eastwood’s recent movies, such as “The 15:17 to Paris,” which bring to the fore the idealistic elements of gun culture while dramatizing the tragic implications that inevitably shadow that idealism. The one sole avowed identity of the Abbott parents is as their children’s defenders; their more obvious public identity is as a white rural family. The only other people in the film, who are more vulnerable to the marauding creatures, are white as well. In their enforced silence, these characters are a metaphorical silent—white—majority, one that doesn’t dare to speak freely for fear of being heard by the super-sensitive ears of the dark others. It’s significant that when characters—two white men—commit suicide-by-noisemaking, they do so by howling as if with rage, rather than by screeching or singing or shouting words of love to their families. (Those death bellows are the wordless equivalent of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”) Whether the Abbotts’ insular, armed way of life might put them into conflict with other American families of other identities is the unacknowledged question hanging over “A Quiet Place,” the silent horror to which the movie doesn’t give voice.