On “A Quiet Place”

The 2018 thriller “A Quiet Place”, directed and acted by John Krasinski, takes the sound design of movies to a whole new level. When it comes to movie sound design, the first thing that comes to mind is the extreme sounds that the designer expresses his creativity to the end, as in the Star Wars series; in A Quiet Place, sound is approached as in a minimalistic touch, together with the effective usage of silence. It is observed that the feature of “music and sound design are not enemies, they work together”, which I think is very important in post-production, is given great importance and this feature is successfully processed in the film.

The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic universe where sound-sensitive monsters kill people the moment they make a sound. The factor that puts the characters in danger is sound itself, makes the audience sensitive to the smallest sound even and achieves a great thrill by it. As an example of the sound design and music working together in the movie, we can show the end of the first ten minutes, which illustrates the universe and characters to the audience.

At the end of this ten-minute segment, while everything is going normally in the visuals, the camera focuses on the hearing-impaired daughter of the family for a while, we hear nothing but a heartbeat, thus we realize something bad will happen on the scene. Immediately after, the scene comes alive with the tension music, with the sound of the toy in the hand of the youngest child, the monster appears for a second and as a result, everything becomes silent again.

The film’s sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn describe it as “a sound designer’s dream”. Erik Aadahl states that this filmworks in contrast to the often used film sound design, and that the minimalist design choices — due to the lack of overlapping sounds to mask each other — are more difficult and demanding than the more commonly used “multi-layered larger than life” designs. Also, Erik Aadahl, in an interview with Walter Murch, says, “The visuals come through the front door, the sound comes through the back door.” emphasizes the importance of sound design, stating that manipulation with sound design can be done much more sneakily than with visuals.

As a result, in an industry dominated by big sounds and music; I think that a work that allows the audience to focus on the sound, full of silence and ambience sounds, and that this work is appreciated so much, can be a new step in sound design.