Krasinski's Expository Whiteboard

What is the WEAKNESS

I like A Quiet Place. It’s a good movie. But it features a piece of exposition that is so terrible and goofy that it is today’s One Perfect Thing.

Here’s a rundown of A Quiet Place that only spoils the first five minutes: A family with young children lives in a world run ragged by blind monsters. If you’re completely silent, they won’t be able to find you. If you make a sound, they will.

It’s a pretty basic thriller. What makes it a good basic thriller is the exposition they leave out. The intro to the movie shows the family learning how to survive in this world. But then you get a time jump to after they’ve already adapted. Their house has a bunch of inventive features designed to keep their lives quiet. Often, I found myself realizing a problem only when the movie showed me the family’s solution to it. That one-step-ahead feeling takes the movie from C+ to A-.

It also stars deaf actress Millicent Simmonds as the family’s deaf eldest daughter. She’s a great young actress and she taught much of the AQP cast and crew how to use American Sign Language. In the movie itself, the family mainly communicates using ASL.

Alas, every rose has its thorn. AQP’s thorn is this whiteboard, which can be spotted in the family’s basement. I’ll let you read it for yourself.

I know I just said that what makes this movie good is what it leaves out. I stand by that! Nearly every single bit of information on this whiteboard has already been communicated to us during the movie without writing—or even saying—a word.

This deftness can probably be attributed to John Krasinski,¹ the director and co-star of A Quiet Place. But all movies are made by studios, and studios are the worst.² At some point in production, the studio must have told Krasinski that he was trusting the audience too much. “Put some words in it!” the studio exec must have yelled over the phone. “Nobody understands the movie! You must ask ‘What is the WEAKNESS’!”

This whiteboard forces us to imagine the (silent) family meeting where they wrote all of this down.

“What do we know about the creature?” Dad signs, standing at the whiteboard. The kids respond by signing “they’re blind!” and “they attack sound!” Dad writes those down. Then he does the Sunday School teacher thing where he sort of spirals his hand in a “come on” gesture to get more answers until someone says the right one.

“Scary!” Nope.
“Loud!” Nope.
“Bad!” Nope.
“Gray!” Nope.
“Teeth!” (he makes the “getting close!” gesture on this one)

Finally, Mom jumps in and signs “armor.”

“YES!” Dad signs furiously, writing armor on the board. He underlines it twice. Then he decides there’s nothing left to write down about these monsters and just… moves on.

Next he writes “HOW MANY IN AREA” as its own bullet point. He ponders, and puts two question marks at the end of it, because he absolutely MUST know. Beneath that, he writes “confirmed” and draws a box, even though “confirmed” is implied by writing the number itself. It would be one thing if he had a box for “suspected” and a box for “confirmed” and he had to differentiate between the two by labeling one “confirmed.” But he doesn’t. So it’s silly.

Later, he writes “3.” You can tell it’s later because it’s in another color.

“Let’s move on to the only other thing we care about,” Dad signs. He turns around, draws a line down the middle, and writes “SURVIVE.” By the same community process as the first time, he gets “medical supplies” and “sound proofing.” He underlines both of these once each, because… well, I’m sure he had a good reason.

Now Dad circles back to the creatures (even though he’s on the “SURVIVE” side of the board). There has to be a weakness. There must be! Forgetting his family entirely, he scribbles angrily “what is the WEAKNESS.” He then grabs a different color marker and draws a box around “WEAKNESS.” Two question marks after Area, but none after WEAKNESS.

He does not leave space to write the weakness underneath “WEAKNESS.” This signals a certain pessimism that they will ever discover the weakness.

Dad turns around, capping the marker. “Family meeting over,” he signs, and walks off.

I’ve thought about this a lot, and that’s why it’s today’s Perfect Thing.

Have a great day!

1. He’s Jim from The Office, but he’s a much better partner and father in AQP than he was on The Office. He’s a bad partner and father on The Office. He buys a house without asking Pam. He proposes to her at a gas station.

2. Not you tho, A24. Never you. 😘