Confession time: When I tried to watch A Quiet Place, I fell asleep. It was quiet out there — maybe too quiet.
The premise of A Quiet Place is familiar: a family trying to survive and stick together in a depopulated, post-apocalyptic world. In this case, the cause of the depopulation turned out to be alien monsters who use only sound to perceive their environment. That means if you stay quiet, you’re safe. But as I sit here, listening to the clicks of my keyboard, it’s obvious that staying quiet is easier said than done.
The original film was a welcome anomaly in the world of 2018: an original story sold as a spec script and produced with a reasonable budget by a mainline studio. A Quiet Place was a classic genre exploitation formula: a lot of buildup and tension-raising, followed by a (hopefully) action-packed climax, where you spend most of your budget — aka The Jaws Formula. It succeeded far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, so actor/director John Krasinski got a second bite at the apple. This time, writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck are out, and Krasinski writes, directs, and acts in the prologue, which shows how the monstrous plague began.
One reason post-apocalyptic movies are popular is that they are relatively cheap to make. A depopulated world means fewer actors to pay, and you can dress your sets with old junk. Showing the actual apocalypse, that’s gonna cost ya. A Quiet Place Part II’s opening sequence violates all of those rules. The small-town Pennsylvania family from the first film, with Lee Abbott (director Krasinski), wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), teen daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and tween son Marcus (Noah Jupe), are attending youngest son Beau’s (Cade Woodward) little league game when mysterious flaming objects start falling from the sky. Soon, the town is overrun with hungry aliens, and the Abbotts learn the hard way that silence is the only way to stay off the menu.
Animalistic space aliens looking to devour humans are one of my pet peeves. So, they have the smarts to develop interstellar spaceships, but once earthside, they suddenly lose language and become wolf-like predators? And just how did they develop a taste for human flesh, anyway? The original alien invasion, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, got this exactly right: The aliens rode around in high-tech tripods zapping people with heat rays. We were not food, we were pests to be exterminated from their new colony. But the opening scene of the last normal day hits differently after the pandemic. Indeed, A Quiet Place Part II had its world premiere on March 8, 2020. When the film skips ahead from Day 1 to Day 474, we now know how that feels.
By Day 474, Lee and Beau are dead, and Evelyn is trying to keep her family, which now includes an infant, alive. They have one advantage: Regan is hearing impaired, and she discovered that her hearing aide produces audio feedback that causes the echolocating intruders pain. The family moves on from the burning farm where they were holed up to find other survivors. When they come across Emmett (Cillian Murphy), Lee’s best friend from the Before Time, holed up in an abandoned steel mill, things don’t go as planned. Instead of a welcome mat, Marcus finds a bear trap that almost snaps his foot off. The survivors, Emmett thinks, are “not people worth saving.” It’s up to Evelyn to prove him wrong.
Marcus’ desperate screams of pain set the sonic tone for the film: long stretches of silence pierced by sudden loud noises, which portend doom. Sound design has always been the horror director’s secret weapon, and few films have ever leaned on it harder. White noise like falling water signifies comforting defense, while the aliens’ clicks and whoops raise your resting pulse rate. The unnamed aliens’ loping gait is supplied by Krasinski himself, who was the motion capture model on set.
Blunt was the heroine of the first film, but this outing is an ensemble piece. Simmonds, who is herself hearing impaired, moves to the forefront as Regan decides it’s up to her to find a way to fully weaponize her hearing aid against the invaders. Breaking the cardinal horror movie rule of “never split up,” she sets off alone on a cross-country trip to find the source of a mysterious radio broadcast, and is soon pursued by Emmett. By the climax, where Evelyn makes the mistake of leaving a teenage boy in charge of an infant, the film is juggling three interlocking storylines. Directed with confidence, and much more relevant than anyone could have known while they were filming, A Quiet Place Part II will keep you awake.