A Quiet Place

Spoiler alert! Please do not read the following plot summary if you have not seen the film.Most of Earth's human population has been wiped out by sightless creatures with hypersensitive hearing and a seemingly impenetrable armored shell that attack anything that makes noise. The Abbott family — husband Lee, wife Evelyn, deaf daughter Regan, and sons Marcus and Beau — silently scavenge for supplies in a deserted town. While out in the open, the family communicates with American Sign Language. Four-year-old Beau is drawn to a battery-operated space shuttle toy, but his father takes it away. Regan returns the toy to Beau, who unbeknownst to her has also taken the batteries his father removed. Beau activates the shuttle when the family is walking home through the woods, near a bridge. Its noise makes him an instant target for a nearby creature, and he is swiftly killed.

A year later, Regan still struggles with guilt over her brother's death, Evelyn is in the final stages of pregnancy, and Lee is fruitlessly trying to make radio contact with the outside world. Lee attempts to upgrade Regan's cochlear implant to restore her hearing, but the device fails. Later, Lee takes Marcus to a nearby river to teach him to fish while Regan visits Beau's grave. Lee explains to Marcus that they will always be safe from the creatures so long as louder sounds mask their audible movements. Alone at the house, Evelyn goes into labor earlier than expected. While making her way to their specially modified soundproof basement, she steps on a large nail. In pain, she accidentally drops a glass picture frame and alerts a nearby creature. Evelyn flips a switch that changes the exterior house lights to red as a danger signal to the others, and struggles to remain silent during her contractions. Arriving at the farm and seeing the lights, Lee instructs Marcus to set off fireworks as a diversion. He finds Evelyn hiding in the bathroom with their newborn son. The baby starts crying, attracting a creature, and they narrowly avoid another attack on the way to the basement. Lee leaves to find the other children, after promising Evelyn he will protect them. Evelyn falls asleep but wakes to discover that the basement is flooded with water from a broken pipe and that a creature is stalking her.

Regan hurries back to the farm. She and Marcus take refuge atop a grain silo, lighting a fire to alert their father to their whereabouts. However, they run out of lighter fluid and the fire dies down, causing Lee to assume that they aren't there. A hatch door gives way and Marcus falls into the silo. He sinks into the corn and nearly suffocates, but Regan jumps in and saves him. They avoid further danger by clinging to the fallen silo door and survive a subsequent creature attack by hiding under it. Regan's repaired cochlear implant reacts to the proximity of the creature by emitting a piercingly loud high-frequency sound that drives the creature away. The children escape from the silo and reunite with Lee. The creature returns and Lee attacks it, while Marcus and Regan hide in a pickup truck. Lee is wounded and Marcus shouts, attracting the creature to the truck. Lee uses sign language to tell Regan and Marcus that he loves them before sacrificing himself by yelling to draw the creature away from his children. Regan and Marcus roll the truck down a hill to escape and reunite with Evelyn and the baby at the farmhouse.

Regan, who was not allowed in the basement previously, sees her father's notes on the creatures and on his experimentation with several different implants. When the creature returns to invade the basement, Regan places the boosted implant on a nearby microphone, magnifying the feedback to ward off the creature. Painfully disoriented, the creature exposes the flesh beneath its armored head, and Evelyn shoots the creature in the head with a shotgun, destroying its head and killing it. The family views a CCTV monitor, showing two creatures attracted by the noise of the shotgun blast approaching the house. With their newly acquired knowledge of the creatures' weakness, the members of the family arm themselves and prepare to fight back.

An intriguing premise makes ‘A Quiet Place’ an essential horror flick because of its understanding of the genre, and a cast that absorbs you into their terrifying world.