WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for director John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, in theaters now.
Every now and then, a film comes along that attempts to redefine sci-fi for a new generation. Alex Garland's Ex Machina and, more recently, Annihilation, are examples of such thought-provoking ventures, and now, John Krasinski adds to the list with his new thriller A Quiet Place.
Set in a near-future where humanity has been devastated by blind, otherworldly creatures that stalk their prey using hyper-sensitive hearing, the film centers on the Abbott family, who seek refuge on an isolated farm. There they're forced to live in near silence in desperate hope of evading these predators, which have already claimed one child.
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Krasinski, in his third directorial effort, crafts a compelling story. But for all of its originality, one thing in particular stands out about A Quiet Place: It displays traits that would make it right at home in another Paramount Pictures property: the Cloverfield universe.
What really highlights how much A Quiet Place matches a Cloverfield narrative is the monsters that have overrun the planet. In this film, we're shown newspaper clippings that Krasinski's character, Lee Abbott, has compiled in hopes of discovering a way to kill these invaders. The primary words that pop up are "invasion" and "from above," implying the monsters are indeed alien, something synonymous with the Cloverfield universe introduced in 2008 by J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves.
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Abrams' found-footage movie featured a skyscraper-tall creature, later confirmed to be an alien that fell from space, that rampages through New York City. Then, in a surprise 2016 sequel, 10 Cloverfield Lane, we saw Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character Michelle fighting off aliens (albeit smaller, and not as destructive) after escaping a kidnapping in Louisiana. In terms of design, however, A Quiet Place's creature lean more toward the alien from the original Cloverfield, which made a cameo earlier this year in the third installment of the franchise, The Cloverfield Paradox.
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Now, while A Quiet Place's much-smaller aliens possess a face similar to that of Stranger Things' Demogorgon, they have the same lanky appendages and body structure as the behemoths from Cloverfield and The Cloverfield Paraodox. Additionally, the way Krasinski depicts them running amok in the countryside, running down prey, evokes the scout-aliens that fell off the giant monster and picked off New York's inhabitants in Cloverfield. The way in which both sets of aliens move through their respective landscapes -- invading, spreading and then becoming the dominant species -- really are cut from the same cloth.
Apart from those physical comparisons, the way in which Krasinski's creatures attack also feels, well, Cloverfield-esque. A Quiet Place relies a lot on mystery, teasing the monsters for most of the film -- similar to what we've seen from the Jaws and Alien franchises -- and then using them in rapid attacks that are heavily based on jump scares. In other words, Krasinski's approach is built on quiet terror and a lurking suspense. That's made easier because A Quiet Place is steeped in silence, but that leads to a style of hide-and-seek, and an associated tension, the Cloverfield movies use to disguise their monsters' movements.
A Quiet Place's overall tone is more akin to 10 Cloverfield Lane than the other two Cloverfield movies. With Michelle, who's kidnapped and forced to live in a bunker with a psychopath (John Goodman) and told the planet's surface is uninhabitable because of a nuclear or chemical attack, 10 Coverfield Lane offered a character study that delved deep into her emotions and relationships with her fellow survivors. That cerebral and isolated affair is similar to what we see in A Quite Place with Lee, his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and their two children. Coincidentally, both movies explode in their final acts, no longer focusing on drama, but on actually killing the aliens -- again, coincidentally -- near cornfields.
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Ultimately, A Quiet Place boasts a Cloverfield formula, in that it's sci-fi that's unsettling, uncomfortable and focused on the struggles of the last remnants of humanity against otherworldly invaders. These common denominators are undeniable, and given that The Cloverfield Paradox created the rift that yielded alternate realities, the ability to tell stories on different Earths with different types of aliens, as well as tales set in different timelines, Krasinski's post-apocalyptic movie could have easily tacked on a mailbox, a newspaper article of a space station, or a message from New York under siege, to tie it into Abrams' universe. Only in this case, it would have felt organic and right at home.
In theaters nationwide, A Quiet Place is co-written and directed John Krasinski, who stars alongside Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds and Cade Woodward.