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Sep 18, 2020Nursebob rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
With only two dozen lines of spoken dialogue in its 90-minute running time, director John Krasinski’s monster movie makes excellent use of camerawork, sound editing, and an electro-pulse score that beats like a frantic heart. The result is one of the scariest fright flicks to come slithering out of Hollywood in years. Let’s start with the monsters—misshapen CGI creatures precariously balanced on long boney claws, hovering between spiders and midnight bogeymen—the perfect nightmare creations to go with the film’s rural setting of tangled forests and dark starry nights. With so much quiet to go around, Krasinski heightens every incidental sound, like a stifled scream or the scrape of hideous claws ascending a staircase, in order to wring maximum terror from a minimum of decibels. It’s the cast however who give the knife its most agonizing twists for their silent masks of horror prove to be more effective than the film’s obligatory jolts. Of course there’s the few physical and technical stretches that go with the genre, but unless you’re an obsessive purist you won’t even notice them as you hold your breath and reach—quietly!—for the earplugs.