Yet somewhere the film loses its nerve – and its bite – settling for disparate grand-scale set pieces (every time director Marc Forster shouted "Action", presumably a producer shouted "More action!") and episodic globe-trotting plot-points, before finding its way to a medical centre in Wales (really) for an oddly old-fashioned third act replete with men in white coats and glowering British TV stalwarts. Paramount Pictures has since released a sequel, A Quiet Place Part II, and a third entry is. Directed by John Krasinski, A Quiet Place originally took the world by storm in 2018 with a tense horror story wherein silence mattered most. The opening is bravura fare, as the running (rather than walking) dead take unexpectedly to the streets, swarming like ants across a landscape littered with fragments of the source novel's socio-political satire (Israel protects itself with a massive wall, North Korea starts pulling out teeth). The World War Z developer, Saber Interactive, has partnered with Paramount Pictures to publish A Quiet Place game, whose development is helmed by iLLOGIKA.
There's some cross-infection too from Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, with which this shares its fears of accelerated global transmission. Unlike George Romero's lumbering corpses, these zombies boast the fleet-footedness of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead reboot, and the shaki-cam craziness of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. In this adaptation of Max Brooks's cult novel, Brad Pitt plays an ex-UN investigator sent to seek out the source of an undead plague that has ravaged the Earth, causing the warm-blooded to scuttle to sea, or flee to the remote wilds of Nova Scotia. Another day, another zombie flick – albeit a bigger budget one with A-list bells on.