Fans of this VW ad will be pleased to hear it’s been made into a feature film.

Not to be confused with Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place is set in a dystopian future where sound-sensitive monsters have killed every loud thing on the planet. So far so good. But Krasinski puts no thought into what this noise-policed post-apocalyptic society might actually look (or sound) like.

You might for instance think it would stop people from having babies, or that the world would be quiet in general. But Krasinski knows better, and has a pregnant main character (Emily Blunt) and even some beeping toys for the kids. It is also one of the loudest films in recent memory, the noisy score and thumping jump scares shattering any eery potential naturally afforded by the quiet conceit. 

Aggressively stupid yet dramatically inert, the movie breaks its one rule at every turn. The creatures are lured by the sound of a raccoon but not by one of the monsters banging loudly on a car. And in order to communicate the family has to converse next to a massive waterfall, famous for their silent deluges. Or if the idea is that the waterfall acts as a kind of undetectable white noise, why not live somewhere surrounded by constant noise instead of a house so quiet they have to play Monopoly with pieces of felt? How many children had to die before they realised they had to throw away Bop It?

While nobody expects watertight plotting from B movies, its disregard for its own logic, coupled with such humourless and pretentious execution, makes A Quiet Place a film to yell at rather than shout about.