Warning: SPOILERS below for A Quiet Place!

A Quiet Place explores the idea of a family hiding from sound-hunting monsters to its full, although it nevertheless does leave one strange question: why does the family in the film have a baby? Director John Krasinski's horror nail-biter centers around the Abbotts, who struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where any type of loud noise invites an immediate attack by relentlessly ravenous alien creatures. Since the monsters are attracted to sound, this would be the absolute worst environment to deliver a newborn baby, but that's exactly what Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) do in the film.

A Quiet Place begins with a prologue of the Abbott family foraging for supplies not long after most of the human race has been massacred by the aliens in 2020. They make their best efforts to remain as quiet as possible, which includes walking everywhere barefoot and doing most of their communication by sign language. Their eldest daughter Regan (Millicent Simmons) is deaf, so the family was already proficient in signing.

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However, the constant challenge of maintaining silence was tragically depicted by their youngest son Beau (Cade Woodward), who couldn't resist turning on the sounds of a toy space shuttle despite his father's admonitions. A monster heard the toy's siren and immediately killed the boy. Beau was about 4 years old and the film showed how even despite his parents' best efforts to instill discipline and explain the severity of their predicament, children will still behave as children.

Why, then, would Lee and Evelyn bring a baby into this world where noise equals death? After all, if a 4-year-old can't be trusted to stay silent, it is absolutely impossible to keep a newborn infant from crying and making constant noise. The adult Abbotts certainly prove responsible and diligent with every other aspect of their family's survival, but Evelyn's pregnancy seems to fly in the face of all of their efforts and would doom them eventually.

The easiest explanation for Evelyn being with child is that it was an accident. She is pregnant over a year after Beau's death, at which point the family had already settled into life in an abandoned farm; they made daily attempts to create a sense of normalcy with chores and sitting down to family meals together. Evelyn and Lee simply behaving as a loving husband and wife is expected.

However, the loss of Beau is also a lingering trauma for the Abbott kids and their parents. It's natural that Lee and Evelyn would want another child to fill the void left behind and help complete their family. There's also a greater responsibility the Abbotts have to somehow not just continue their family but also help propagate the human race. There's no telling how many people are left on Earth in the film, but humanity itself also needs to continue in spite of the aliens. How conscious the Abbotts are of this isn't known, but it's essential to the film's themes.

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The reality of the challenges their baby and his associated noise would bring do weigh heavily on Lee and Evelyn's minds, which is why they make preparations to turn the basement of their farmhouse soundproof. They built a wooden crib for their baby that muffles his cries and hoped the mattress covering the top of the stairs would stifle the sounds below - and it did work, at first. All that said, it's also worth noting that when their baby is born, the Abbotts are extremely fortunate to have a very cooperative newborn who actually doesn't constantly cry and attract the aliens.

Still, the baby is a devilishly clever plot device by screenwriters Brian Wood, Scott Beck, and Krasinski. Audiences can easily relate to how hard it is to keep a newborn from crying and how much worse it would be in a world where killer creatures would flock to the noise. The baby ratchets up the tension and scares in A Quiet Place to the Nth degree, and the valiant efforts of the Abbotts to protect their newborn son and their family as a whole are among the reasons why A Quiet Place is such a riveting film.

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