A Quiet Place, Part 2
As reported by Dollyforme
Theatres are back in full force now! Yea! Anyway I went out and saw the amazing Emily Blunt star in A Quiet Place Part 2 and as the format of the title suggests, A Quiet Place Part II is less a sequel and more a continuation of the first, sensationally popular instalment, picking things up in its immediate and devastating aftermath. But first, there's a nail-biting prologue to get through, which takes us all the way back to where the horror began on Day 1, as the Abbotts, including a briefly reanimated John Krasinski, go from hanging out at a Little League game with their small-town pals to running for their lives when fire in the sky spells danger.
Skip to Day 474 and Emily Blunt's Evelyn is now the sole grown-up guarding her family from the blind monsters who will leap on the slightest sound. With her three remaining children – Millicent Simmonds's plucky Regan, Noah Jupe's nervous Marcus, and a cute newborn – in tow, she heads for signs of life, quickly coming across old friend Emmett (Cillian Murphy), who is mourning his entire family and is reluctant to team up with the Abbotts. Evelyn's deaf daughter Regan is keen to lead them all to safety and to share her discovery of the monsters' weakness with others, so when she picks up a radio transmission that sounds promising she strikes out on her own.
Krasinski resumes writing and directing duties (this time he's the sole author of the screenplay) and his knack for building suspense ensures a fitting and ferociously enjoyable follow-up. A sequence that cuts superbly between three different strands of action, whilst maintaining both coherence and excitement, is a stand-out, and the continued focus on silence and creeping distinguishes Part II from brasher forms of horror, without it ever being less frightening.
The obvious point to make about A Quiet Place Part II, one that I’m sure most critics already have, is that the long-awaited sequel has a new degree of relevance given the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. That’s not necessarily wrong given the obvious parallels in a family emerging from lockdown after being driven to isolation by an alien menace and the reliably unhinged reactions to it by the general public, even if it is a bit easy. But there’s no denying that A Quiet Place Part II is topical. It’s also hopeful, in a weird, roundabout, almost unrealistic way. The only way to survive in this world, once again brought to life by writer-director John Krasinski, is by shutting up and listening. In a story full of spidery extra-terrestrials with super hearing, a blinding top-speed, and a mean pimp slap, the thing I found hardest to swallow was that there would be enough people keeping their mouths shut to build a movie around. You cannot fault Krasinski’s optimism.
Luckily, you can’t fault his direction, either. He’s barely in this one apart from a guest appearance in a chaotic flashback prologue, and he’s replaced for long stretches in the beardy survivalist dad role by Cillian Murphy, but his fingerprints are everywhere, from the tightly-engineered suspense sequences – there are a couple of white-knuckle ones, believe me – to the almost obsessive attention paid to the minute details of a world where the slightest sound can get you killed. This, admittedly, feels less like a proper sequel and more like a coda to the first film, picking up minutes after and unfolding over a short enough period that the screenplay doesn’t have to ask any bigger questions about the mythology. But it has just enough new ideas, and such a firm grasp of its old ones, that you scarcely have time to think about the bigger implications anyway.
For those who’re either uninitiated or have simply forgotten in all the time that A Quiet Place Part II has spent sitting on a shelf somewhere, the premise imagines a world beset by alien invaders who’re blind but hyper-sensitive to sound. Being one of the first films to get a theatrical run after prolonged closures means it’s inevitable that certain moviegoers will wish this menace would descend upon the screening full of excitable chatterboxes who tend to clog up such things. It’s streaming on Paramount Plus soon, which is perhaps just as well, but in the meantime, it’s worth seeing in the earliest, emptiest showing you can find since its sound design remains exceptional, its silences speak volumes, and nobody off-screen is likely to keep their traps shut long enough for you to realize these things if you catch it on an evening or a weekend.
Anyway, those aliens. They’re an impressive feat of visual design, somehow appearing original but not nonsensical, which is a hard balance to achieve these days, especially when we’re able to see so much of them. This remains a quiet place, but only rarely a dark one; Krasinski delights in letting these long-limbed monsters loose in broad daylight or well-lit areas. They have armoured carapaces that make them effectively bulletproof, but as we learned in the climax of the first film, a certain blast of high-frequency sound causes the plating to retreat and expose a fleshy, toothy mush, vulnerable to shotgun blasts and the enthusiastic application of metal objects. For a good stretch of the film, Emily Blunt’s frazzled matriarch Evelyn, her deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and her noisy, idiot son Marcus (Noah Jupe), carry around what is essentially a boombox, which is only one of the ways in which A Quiet Place Part II can build suspense out of something that’s quite silly when you think about it.
The film's logic isn't always great: why Evelyn doesn't make a proper sling in order to carry her baby more effortlessly is baffling – and why she is never seen feeding it, not least to keep it quiet (a more blindingly obvious and less risky solution than the little oxygen box) also remains a mystery. But the tough choices the characters must make to survive keeps the jeopardy up, the force of a mother's love and sight of brave children coming to the fore means things are consistently emotionally involving, while the cast – particularly Blunt and Simmonds – are superb. It all makes for a film that's as stirring as it is scary.
