The consensus is that A Quiet Place is a critical darling, a box office hit, and a film where eating popcorn should be forbidden.

I saw it a couple of weeks ago with my son when he was visiting me in Copenhagen. One thing I didn’t fully consider–what was I thinking?– was that the subtitles would be in Danish! Upon further reflection, this makes the film even better as a case study for merging art and business.

John Krasinski scores twice as director and star in this clever horror film. The story is simple: a family lives in silence to elude creatures that can’t see them but can use sound with astonishing skill to track their prey.

Krasinski plays farmer Lee Abbott, and his real-life wife Emily Blunt plays Evelyn Abbott. There seems to be nothing Blunt cannot do onscreen–she’s always worth watching.

Of their three children, daughter Regan is deaf. Millicent Simmonds, who has been deaf since infancy, gives a powerful performance. Having a child with hearing loss gives the family an advantage in surviving the predators because they can use sign language to communicate.

That’s where the subtitles come into play. On the plus side, most of the film really is silent, and when family members are signing, it’s not hard to figure out what they are saying. I never felt lost while watching, even though my Danish vocabulary is about a dozen words.

On the other hand, the focus on visual storytelling instead of dialogue and the ease of changing subtitles for international audiences make this film particularly easy to export.

The film is a taut 90 minutes, and the writing sets up the story with efficiency and more depth than I expected.

So, A Quiet Place scores high for me in the art category as a genre picture that meets expectations but still feels original, and the particularities of this story that make it inviting for non-English-speaking viewers also make worldwide distribution easier.

I call that a win-win.