In the neatly spun and well-crafted supernatural thriller “A Quiet Place,” the humans don’t have to worry about the slimy, creepy, lizard-like creatures seeing them, because these particular monsters are literally blind.

Problem is, if you create a noise — from knocking over an object to engaging in whispered conversation — you will trigger the incredibly sensitive hearing mechanisms of these creatures and they will use that sound as a homing device, and they will end you in a split second.

John Krasinski is the director, co-writer and star of “A Quiet Place.” His real-life wife, Emily Blunt, plays his spouse in this movie.

“A Quiet Place” doesn’t have the pin-you-to-your-seat originality of “Get Out,” or the psychological depth and pure scare impact of “Lights Out” or the wall-to-wall intensity of “Don’t Breathe,” but it is one of the smarter and more involving horror films of the last few years.

It takes a certain confidence of material and vision for a filmmaker to hit the ground running with a movie, plunging us into the story without exposition and trusting we’ll stay with it for a number of scenes.

The first title card tells us it’s “Day 89” of … something. Something so bad the world as we know it has ceased to exist and most of the population has been wiped out by the aforementioned alien monster creatures that kill everything and anything that makes a sound.

The Abbotts, dad Lee (Krasinski), mom Evelyn (Blunt), daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and son Marcus (Noah Jupe) are one of the few families that have figured out a way to survive.

They have a number of factors in their favor. They live on a farm in upstate New York, so growing crops isn’t a problem. Dad has some excellent survivalist skills and teenage Regan is deaf, so everyone in the family knows how to sign. They’ve known how to communicate in silence long before the aliens invaded. (Simmonds, the deaf actress who plays Regan, is brilliant.)

Throughout the timeline, no matter what the situation — they need to warn someone of imminent danger, the birth of a baby, stepping on a nail, etc. — various members of the Abbott family must keep quiet. That’s a pretty nifty setup to keep the tension going from moment to moment.

The camera work and the sets and the lighting — all superb. Blunt and Krasinski are lovely together, particularly in a scene where they find a moment of tenderness amidst the chaos and uncertainty, and dance to a certain Neil Young song.

Krasinski clearly enjoys invoking well-worn GOTCHA! scary movie moments, e.g., the sudden appearance of an evil alien in the background accompanied by a music sting as our hero remains oblivious, or the premature celebration of the monster’s death.

I also got a sense of cinematic deja vu from time to time, due to some superficial similarities to M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs,” from the farm setting to the actual sounds the aliens make.

Not to suggest “A Quiet Place” doesn’t have its own signature style. This is the kind of film that delivers on about 75 percent of its promise and has you looking forward to the time when the director hits something all the way out of the park.