Evelyn is pregnant, and now the adults must wonder how she is going to have the baby without modern anaesthetic and without making a sound. Yet, as the story continues, there is a new challenge.

It is Regan’s disability that has enabled the family to cope – an elegant narrative contrivance from Beck and Woods. Lee has even got his soldering iron out and tinkered with adapting a new hearing aid for her. Their son, Marcus (Noah Jupe), and daughter, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), are well drilled in the new soundless, wordless discipline and the point is that Regan is hearing impaired, so the whole family has already had to learn sign language to communicate. We get the time-honoured scenes in the ruined supermarket, and that weird frisson of seeing stuff that you could just take if you wanted, but who cares now that consumerist law and order has utterly broken down? One of their kids wants to take a toy model of the space shuttle Challenger (poignantly yearning for a rocket to take them all away from this ruined planet) but Lee fixes him with a bayonet gaze of disapproval, while grabbing this unexploded noise-bomb and silently removing the batteries.

Krasinski and Blunt play Lee and Evelyn, a couple who now run an efficient Trappist-survivalist smallholding in the countryside, while making regular forays into the devastated town for supplies.

But making the slightest noise brings them out, doing everything but sniff the air, like a horrible mix of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Steven Spielberg’s T rex and Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

So, as long as you can keep silent all the time, in a 24/7 hyper-alert state of anticipation, you’re all right. The thing is, they’re blind but have advanced hearing. There has been some sort of ecological disaster or invasion and now all of humanity, or at any rate everyone in this indeterminate part of the United States, lives in fear of giant reptile predators who stalk the land.

A quiet place (2018)