A Quiet Place is one of the most efficiently constructed horror films of the past decade. John Krasinski, directing his third feature, delivers a film with almost no dialogue, almost no exposition, and almost no fat. At 90 minutes, it does not waste a frame.

The premise is simple and terrible: creatures with extraordinary hearing have decimated the human population. Sound is death. A family, the Abbotts, has survived by learning to live in near silence. They communicate in sign language, walk on sand, eat on soft surfaces, and count every noise. Their youngest daughter is deaf. She was born into silence and taught the family, accidentally, how to survive.

The film barely explains its world. It trusts you to understand the rules and infer the history. That decision pays off: your imagination fills the gaps with something worse than any exposition could provide.

Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (also starring) are exceptional as parents whose marriage is under the specific and extraordinary strain of grief and guilt. Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf, brings authentic experience to Regan Abbott: the film’s most complicated emotional arc belongs to her.

The set piece involving a bathtub, a nail, and a newborn infant is one of the most tense scenes in recent memory. Krasinski knows exactly where to put his camera and exactly how long to hold.

A Quiet Place argues that horror cinema is most effective when it is about something, in this case, parenthood, the terror of bringing a child into a hostile world, the impossibility of keeping them safe. Everything in the film grows from that.