Jeremy and I saw A Quiet Place months ago in the theater. I had heard what a communal experience it was to see that particular movie in the theater - a whole audience trying to be, well, quiet. So I pre-unwrapped our candy at home and went to the theater ready to settle in and be silent.
If you haven't seen this movie yet, you should. It would have been best for you to see it in a theater, surrounded by an excellent sound system and immersed in a larger-than-life viewing environment. It would have been best to see it near other people, to appreciate how you were all collectively holding your breath the whole time. And this is true even if you don’t usually like horror films. Because while A Quiet Place is technically a horror film (or thriller or whatever)…it also totally is not. It is a movie about parenting. Really! Find an opportunity to watch it.
I was prepared to see this movie and then make all the jokes about how I lived in this world every day as a mother of tiny babies who would wake up from a nap at the smallest sound. Ask any parent and they probably know which cabinet slams just a little, and which spots on the floor creak. So I thought I’d be in that theater and snicker to myself a little about how this is JUST like that.
But I didn’t have time to even make that stupid joke to myself or Jeremy because I was blown away by the emotions I felt during this horror film. I cried. Twice. At church the next day I kept replaying a certain scene and thinking about what it meant to me in my life. You might know from the trailer (or the movie, if you've seen it) that Emily Blunt’s character is pregnant in the movie’s monster-infested world, and your first instinct, like mine, is probably to scoff and think, yeah, ok, like anyone would choose to have a baby under those circumstances.
But that’s what I can’t stop thinking about – who are any of us to have babies when and where we do? How dare we bring children into this monster-infested world?
And who are we if we can’t protect them?
So yeah, school starts tomorrow and I'm sending my two oldest out into the world again after a summer where we've spent a LOT of time together and this is on my mind. That is all.
