A Quiet Place Ending Explained

This article contains A Quiet Place spoilers.

As it turns out, you can make a sound in A Quiet Place—so long as it is loud enough that it’s too much for these blind demons that hunt us. Such is the ending to John Krasinski’s surprisingly taut and relentlessly grueling horror movie. Because for the entire picture up until that point, we have been told that to even speak above a whisper is to invite death. And that is still true, but it is now time for the monster’s deaths too.

In the final scene of the film, Emily Blunt’s Evelyn and her three remaining children are trapped inside the basement of their farmhouse. In the corner, young Marcus (Noah Jupe) huddles with a newborn babe in his arms, which is one waking cry away from being swallowed whole by this beast walking down the staircase. Things genuinely would appear helpless if not for Regan Abbott’s disability turning out to be their greatest asset. Regan, wonderfully played by Millicent Simmonds, already had an advantage over her siblings and even her parents in that she is as deaf as the monsters are blind. As a result, she is less inclined to ever need to make a sound—although that comes with its own disadvantages too.

However, one such liability, at least from Regan’s vantage, turns out to be her greatest fortune. Before his death, her father (Krasinski) continued to try and help her despite her hearing disability in spite of her understandable frustration with the condition. Continuing to fiddle with hearing aids, he’d hoped to give his daughter something resembling the gift of hearing, but what he instead gifted her with was a tool that saved her life. For when the aids’ signal crossed with other strong frequencies, it created a deafening cacophony of disharmony. And no frequency appears to be stronger in this post-apocalyptic world than the one emanating from the monsters that hunt them… including the one inside the basement with her at the end of the film.

Weakening the creature by crossing its own internal, biological frequencies with her aid, she is able to stun the beast long enough to realize she can transmit the sound across the room by placing her aid right up next to her late father’s microphone. Now why would a microphone still be equipped to work in a world where even the sound of a lamp falling over invites the monsters to your door is a complete mystery. But be that as it may, she is able to bounce her aid off Lee’s sound system, and as a result truly cripple the creature.

This also keeps the monster frozen long enough for Evelyn to blow its head off with a shotgun. It’s a satisfying moment, although what it means for the future of these people is a little more uncertain. They have discovered a way to kill one monster, but can it be effectively used to root out and destroy all the aliens?

This somehow leading to kind of Independence Day movement of “taking the aliens down” seems less likely to me. Not only is mass communication in this world sparse, but there also was a great deal of luck involved in killing this one alien, as it got itself trapped in a confined space with a loud sound system being available. It might prove more difficult to replicate this effect outside or in the open.

Nevertheless, the baby that Evelyn gave birth to showed that she is prepared to think about a future beyond just surviving in this farmhouse. The fact that she has now seen that child born and an alien killed means there is a hope for the future. Even the final moment is of her cocking the shotgun shows a weird renewal of life. The future is uncertain, but one thing is clear, they’re now not so afraid of making a sound.