Silence
The world of A Quiet Place is indeed quiet, and necessarily so. The planet has been invaded and overwhelmed by vicious creatures who hunt by sound. “All life that is living in this world has had to adapt to this new situation,” sound editor Erik Aadahl told Slate. Any single bird chirping would be dead. Birds that have survived would have learned the rules.”
And so have the Abbotts—father Lee, mother Evelyn, children Regan and Marcus. Their continued lives are dependent on how quiet they can be. They walk through the forest, shoeless. They perform their chores in hushed tranquility. When they speak, they sign with their hands. And when they gather for dinner, they clasp hands and pray—silently, of course.
I don’t think their last name was chosen on a whim. In Christian tradition, an abbot was the head of a monastery, and monastic orders are often associated with times of silence. They prized meditative quiet, believing that God could best be found in the velvet folds of stillness. Like Elijah discovered in 1 Kings 19:12, they felt that they could hear the Almighty in a “low whisper,” and that whisper requires a certain level of quietude. They weren’t frightened of literal monsters. But they were terrified of losing their connection with the Creator, of losing themselves to the ravenous sins and noisy temptations of the world. Silence was more than a symbol of their devotion. It was a very practical reminder of why they lived and Who they lived for. It protected them from what they considered some life-threatening behavior, too, curbing the temptation to express anger or envy, to blaspheme their God or insult their fellow man. As Jesus said in Matthew 15:11, it’s not what goes in someone’s mouth that’s the problem, but what comes out of it.
And so those ancient monks, like the movie’s Abbotts, would often work and eat and pray in silence, watchful and mindful of God’s whispered words.
It’s a tribute to Krasinski’s filmmaking that the silence in A Quiet Place is itself a multilayered thing. It heightens the tension, naturally, riveting the audience on every little stray peep or rustle. Some moviegoers said that even the sound of popcorn being chewed felt like a betrayal of the on-screen family. But it also comes across as beautiful. Bucolic. Steeped in family and fellowship. None of us would like to live in a world filled by A Quiet Place’s fearsome monsters. But at times, we’d be forgiven for perhaps envying them a little—their closeness with each other, with the natural world around them and, perhaps, even with God.
But that pastoral, deceptively peaceful world is about to get a whole lot noisier.
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