A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s debut into directing horror and written by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, focuses on a post-apocalyptic world where beings who hunt by sound have ravaged civilization. One family, hunkered down in a remote cabin, fights to survive as they prepare for the birth of a new baby.
In particular, we focus on their teenage daughter Regan, which is who we’ll be looking at today –
The Best Character for the Job
This is a world where any noise can kill you. You need to be alert at all times to how loud you’re being. But you also need to be able to communicate silently. Function without any noise.
At the perfect nexus of this is Regan, who is deaf. She is both the most advantaged – she’s already familiar with having to live without sound, knows sign language – and the most disadvantaged – without her hearing aid, she doesn’t know what is or is not dangerous. Together, this makes her uniquely suited to this world and all the more compelling for us to watch. We want to see her face extraordinary circumstances, even more difficult than what other characters are facing – and we want to see her use what’s special about her to do so.
But it’s not just the external factors that make her suited to this story. The family has suffered a great loss, one that Regan feels responsible for. She’s not alone in that regard. Everyone is struggling with how they feel about her, their love for her. That internal struggle is as important as the external ones to making her ideally suited for this story.
As you’re planning your next project, it’s great to take the time to really think about your premise and what would main character would be best suited for it, both for the internal and external elements of the story.