A Quiet Place (2018) — PICK
I’ve long said that for a positive contemporary Hollywood portrayal of Catholicism, your best bet is a supernatural horror film. Similarly, for a wholesome, archetypal portrayal of family life, with highly competent, heroically self-sacrificing parents and an implicit pro-life theme, a post-apocalyptic horror movie like A Quiet Place is the place to go.
The unnamed couple, played by real-life married couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directs), have a low-key emotional intimacy that would be moving in any screen couple.
Centrally, A Quiet Place offers an empathic portrayal of disability, namely deafness — a dangerous disability in a world where silence is so crucial, but one with its own advantages, including American Sign Language fluency. (Millicent Simmonds, who plays the eldest child, is really deaf and coached her fellow cast members in ASL.)
While A Quiet Place is terrific just the way it is, I can’t help wishing there were more families like this in other kinds of movies.
The Blu-ray includes a trio of bonus features exploring the process of bringing the story to the screen. A 15-minute featurette covers the development of the script, the film’s themes and various aspects of production. There’s a 12-minute featurette on the challenges of sound design, and an eight-minute extra explains the creature design.
Caveat Spectator: Much intense menace and peril, scary creature effects and occasional deadly creature violence; a bloody labor sequence. Teens and up.