A Quiet Place’s most horrific scene proves people don’t know how to watch movies

A clip from A Quiet Place has unwittingly attracted a flood of anal-retentive, CinemaSins-pilled responses lamenting how dumb it is — will the movie gods forgive us?

Cinema can, and should, reflect real life; where would we be without Ken Loach’s kitchen-sink oeuvre, the sweet-until-it’s-bitter romance that caps off Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, or the uncompromising, sickeningly believable imagery in Come and See? 

It can also be an escape in more ways than one: a brief sojourn into a world more exciting, funny, and terrifying than ours ever could be (hopefully). We don’t have a Spider-Man swinging majestically around New York City, the vast majority of legal cases don’t end with “I want the truth!” blunderbuss’ing, and thankfully, Terrifier’s Art the Clown doesn’t exist in real life — but we love to watch all of it because even the most authentic movie’s sole purpose isn’t realism: it’s being a good film. 

Case and point: the opening scenes of A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s smash-hit horror movie about a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by blind aliens with a pin-drop sense of hearing. We see a family (Lee, Evelyn, and their kids Marcus, Regan, and Beau) gathering supplies at an abandoned store. 

Beau, the youngest of the children, finds a space shuttle toy that he wants to take away. His dad tells him it’s too loud — but Regan, trying to be a nice big sister, takes out the batteries and quietly gives it to him… and when she’s not looking, he swipes the batteries back. 

As they walk home along their carefully crafted, near-silent route (sand muffles the sound of dying-to-be-crunched leaves), he tails behind Regan at the back. Suddenly, Regan sees a look of horror on her dad’s face as her mother fights to conceal a scream: Beau put the batteries back in the toy, and seconds later, just before Lee can grab him, a monster leaps out of the trees and kills him. 

There are questions that could be asked: not only is it the end of the world, but the stakes of making a sound are life-or-death, so why would she give him the toy; why was the youngest child walking at the back; and would Lee’s sprinting not making enough noise to attract another alien? 

The clip of Beau’s death was shared on X/Twitter, and I have an uncomfortable truth for everyone who raised the above queries and other insufferable nitpicks: you need to get a life and stop enabling the CinemaSins “ping!” in your head at every ‘plot hole’ and logical inconsistency you see. 

There are easy in-world and off-camera rebuttals to all of these criticisms: she’s his big sister, so they assumed he’d be okay in her care; she didn’t know he picked up the batteries, nor were they aware they had the toy; the aliens may be more sensitive to the higher pitch and loud static of the toy, rather than anyone running on sand; and Regan’s guilt and her dad’s apparent resentment after Beau’s death is a major through-line of the film. 

Also, sh*t happens, and people’s “why didn’t they do this?” criticisms come from a bird’s eye perspective that always neglects the lived-in experience and inevitable complacency of a movie’s characters; we’re the all-seeing eye, and we fear everything — they don’t. 

This is arguably the biggest point, which should be your UNO reverse card for this and similar rifts with pedallers of pedantry: it’s dramatically effective, an exercise in inescapable, gut-twisting terror that makes you want to shout “no!” at the screen. 

Think of the big-screen moments that would have been nixed if the filmmakers thought, “Hmm, that wouldn’t happen.” 

In Cliffhanger, Sylvester Stallone could have used both hands to grab Michelle Joyner — but he didn’t. 

In Jurassic World, why did that one woman get singled out for one of the most brutal deaths in the franchise, a feeding frenzy between land, air, and sea? Because it was awesome. 

In Titanic, why wouldn’t Rose help Jack onto the door instead of letting him freeze to death? Because it’s far more poignant for Rose to lose her one true love to the depths and then throw her Heart of the Sea into the water. 

Stop making sense and start enjoying movies; it’s a better way to live. 

If you’re looking for something else to watch, you can check out our list of the best horror movies of all time, and new movies you should stream this month.

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