A Quiet Place is a chilling but riveting film that delivers a fresh twist on the horror
genre.
Yippee ki-yay movie lovers, it's Jan here and today I'm breaking down the ending to
A Quiet Place, plus explaining some details you probably didn't know about the creatures
in the movie.
If this is your first time here, I do regular movie breakdowns, so if you enjoy this video
be sure to subscribe for more.
Spoiler warning, I'll be discussing the whole movie, so take care if you've not seen it
yet.
A Quiet Place is set in a near future in which an alien invasion has decimated swathes of
the human population around the world.
The creatures have super-sensitive hearing and so survivors like the Abbotts live as
quietly as possible.
This is why John Krasinski's character Lee puts down sand trails to muffle sounds while
walking and everyday life has been completely adapted to dampen any sound.
The monsters are blind, so visual signals are an important way for the human characters
to communicate.
And because the family have a deaf daughter, they have been able to use the American Sign
Language they learned with her to talk silently with each other.
Ok, let's take a look at the alien creatures and why they attack anything making a sound.
Design-wise the aliens are rather interesting – they're different from but do bring to
mind other creatures like the Demogorgon in Stranger Things, the xenomorph in the Alien
movies, the monster in Cloverfield, and the crazy sharp teeth you see with Venom.
The film's production designer Jeffrey Beecroft has said that he took inspiration for the
alien's form from a Nautilus shell.
The nautilus is a type of sea creature that has very poor eyesight although A Quiet Place
dials that up, making the aliens completely blind.
By the way, there are various newspaper clippings which describe the aliens as either "Death
Angels" or "Angels of Death" which is interesting because, in the Jewish tradition, the archangel
Samael is known as the angel of death and is sometimes referred to as the "blind god"
as well.
And the aliens really do seem to be the bringers of death, but Lee has been researching them
extensively and on his white board we can see the main things he knows about them.
One thing he's still trying to figure out is the answer to the question "Why don't they"
– I think that says – "eat their kill?"
Although the movie doesn't seem to touch on this in an obvious manner, production designer
Jeffrey Beecroft has explained that "when loud sound vibrates inside [the aliens' body],
it's intensely painful and they will destroy anything that makes noise."
And we do see them pulsating and thrashing around when they're faced with a big sound.
Which means the real reason why the creatures attack anything making a loud noise isn't
for sport or for food – instead, it seems like they're trying to eliminate [loud] sounds
in the environment around them.
And, of course, as the family eventually discovers, although the aliens' hypersensitivity to sound
makes them deadly to life on earth, it's actually their weakness as well.
And that makes Lee's efforts to develop a working hearing aid for his daughter Regan,
played by Millicent Simmonds, the key to the story.
The new hearing aid he gives her doesn't work properly and creates a high-pitched sound
that is not only uncomfortable to her, but is also unbearable to the creatures when they're
nearby.
It seems likely that because the aliens are blind, they rely on a sort of echolocation,
or bio sonar to emit soundwaves that they can track to navigate and hunt.
These soundwaves create audio feedback when they hit the amplifiers in Regan's hearing
aid and, because of the creatures' audio hypersensitivity, the amplified feedback sound ends up being
extremely painful for the aliens.
Now, when you watched the movie you may have been hoping that Regan knew this when she
and her brother were hiding in the car as it could have saved their father, but at that
moment she didn't understand that the hearing aid's audio feedback was affecting the aliens.
When it happened the first earlier, the alien was behind her in the corn field and although
we could hear the creature rustling, because Regan is deaf, she had no idea it was behind
her – all she could feel was the uncomfortable pitch from the feedback loop right by her
head.
And when Regan and her brother were in the silo, although she also felt the feedback
she didn't realise that was the reason the creature ran off.
It's not until Regan is in the basement with her mother and they are confronted with an
alien that suddenly goes into an uncontrollable spasm that Regan understands her hearing aid
has uncovered the monster's weakness.
But the feedback doesn't kill the creature and it comes back at them.
However, its head is exposed as it opens up so Evelyn kills it with a shotgun blast to
the face.
This leads us to the very final moment of the movie where Evelyn and Regan realise what
they have to do.
As the remaining aliens come running to the farmhouse attracted by the noise of the gun,
Regan and Evelyn have the hearing aid, speaker and shotgun at the ready.
According to Lee's white board there should be two creatures left in the area, so it should
be possible for them to take them both out.
The wider world might also recover if the discovery can be relayed to others so that
sound-based weapons can be developed to take down the alien invasion.
By the way, the idea of being pregnant during this apocalyptic time is interesting both
in terms of the plot and for what it symbolises.
Obviously, it creates a huge problem as not only is giving birth in total silence impossible,
but a new-born baby will also naturally cry out.
To cope with this, the family builds a special basement area with a box for the baby complete
with an oxygen tank.
The underground room is covered with a mattress which seems to muffle sounds coming from below
enough to keep any creatures from detecting them.
The birth was actually supposed to take place in this room but, of course, Evelyn was forced
to give birth in the bathroom while she was hiding from the alien invading the house.
Symbolically, Evelyn's pregnancy and birth signals hope for their family and the future
of the world and you can also see this in the fact that, despite their terrible situation,
Evelyn tries to move forward by home-schooling her children and both parents try to maintain
their spirits with family dinners and board games.
This indicates that the Abbot family is trying to thrive, not just survive, during this nightmarish
time.
By the way, the scene where Evelyn is in the flooded basement with the baby is an interesting
call-back to earlier in the film where Lee showed his son Marcus how the sound of the
waterfall would mask noises they made.
The sound of the water in the flooding basement muffled some of the sound of the whimpering
baby, but Evelyn took herself and the baby behind a sheet of falling water as the baby
started to cry and just like with the waterfall, the noise of the falling water was enough
to drown out the baby's crying.
So, did you enjoy A Quiet Place and what did you think about the creatures?
Also, would you like to see follow-up stories set in this universe, along the lines of the
Cloverfield movies?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and you can also tweet me @Jan_Gilbert
or @FlicksCity.
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Thanks for watching and see ya next time.
Yippee-ki-yay movie lovers.