This article contains spoilers

The actor-turned-director John Krasinski’s new horror film A Quiet Place has received widespread acclaim, due in part to its representation of deafness.

The film is set in post-apocalyptic America where creatures with super-sensitive hearing find and attack people who make any noise. The film follows a family that has managed to survive 89 days through living as silently as possible. This is largely due to the circumstances of their daughter, Regan, who is deaf. As a result, the family are able to communicate silently using American Sign Language (ASL) that helps them to avoid drawing the monsters’ attention.

The largely silent film has been praised for featuring a character, Regan, who has a disability, something that is uncomfortably uncommon in Hollywood. Regan is also developed and central to the plot, which is another thing that films often fall short on. She is also played by a deaf actress, Millicent Simmonds. Of the few other films that feature deafness (such as Baby Driver, Wonder, and The Shape of Water, to name some recent ones), most either side-line the character who is deaf or cast a non-disabled actor in place of an actor who is disabled. This is not due to a lack of deaf actors.

Hollywood is known to have a problem with disability representation. According to the website IndieWire, 59 non-disabled actors have received Oscar nominations for playing characters with disabilities. Off-screen, as well, the film industry body CreativeSkillset reports that 1.5% of the UK film production workforce identifies as disabled, compared to 14% of the general population in the UK.

This makes John Krasinski’s “non-negotiable” decision to cast a deaf actress in the role of Regan a progressive one. Many members of the deaf community have praised the film for its inclusion of deafness and ASL as central plot points. Several scenes are shown from the perspective of Regan, showing the viewer the world through the lens of a character that is deaf. One actress who is deaf has written in a Cosmopolitan article that seeing Millicent Simmonds in

the film “inspired me and an even younger generation of deaf actors to keep putting themselves out there.”

Although A Quiet Place is often discussed in terms of bringing positive exposure to the deaf community (and this may be true), the film also benefited from casting an actress who is deaf. Millicent Simmonds brought her personal experience to set, and John Krasinski described her in interviews as a “guide” during filming, who he frequently asked for advice on details. Kamran Makkick, CEO of Disability Rights UK, says

Millicent provides “an extra dimension to the role which a hearing actor would not have been able to do.”

However, casting someone with a disability for a central disabled role does not mean that the film is beyond criticism; it has also been accused of falling into damaging representations of deafness.

In an article for the Huffington Post, Pamela J. Kincheloe, an associate professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York, persuasively argued that the film still falls short. It is often considered to be a deaf-centric film because the vast majority of it (about 95%) is silent, and deafness and ASL are arguably presented as a helpful survival tool, rather than a limitation. However, the silence that the daughter Regan experiences through her deafness is also used as a tool to unsettle non-disabled viewers and build suspense. Furthermore, Kincheloe writes, the silence “is depicted as tragic,”and prevents characters from entirely expressing their emotions: pain from childbirth and loss, and love, which in one scene must be expressed through headphones and music.

There is also a flip side to the portrayal of silence and ASL as helpful; later on in the film the family worries for Regan, who is unable to hear an approaching monster. The creatures are ultimately defeated through the use of sound, and a world full of noise and speech is restored.

Despite these criticisms, many people in the deaf community are pleased with the representation and casting of an actress who plays a central character and is herself deaf. However, the representation is still, at least in part, problematic. The effect that this film has for future Hollywood portrayals of deafness remains to be seen, but a sequel to A Quiet Place is currently being planned, and it will be interesting to see how, and if, deafness is included in this.

What are your thoughts on A Quiet Place? Share your stories, thoughts, and hopes, with the Patient Worthy community!