Review: A Quiet Place Part II Ramps Up the Thrills and the Emotion with Gusto

Throughout, John Krasinski seems to be in his comfort zone when staking tension on the importance of family and legacy.

A Quiet Place Part II
Photo: Paramount Pictures

John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II opens in flashback, with an impressively orchestrated set piece organized around a Little League game as the Abbott family gathers to watch Marcus (Noah Jupe) take his turn at bat. A massive and unexplained disaster in Shanghai is being reported on the news as Lee (Krasinski) pops into a general store for snacks, but it’s one that feels very far away as he parks his pickup and rushes to take his seat in the bleachers. Then, something weird appears in the sky—a meteorite seems to explode as it streaks through the clouds—and everyone rushes to their cars just as alien creatures arrive on the scene, bent on destruction and compensating for their blindness by being able to hear extremely well. Anyone who hopes to survive is forced into silence.

As we know from A Quiet Place, the Abbots survive this initial onslaught largely due to their facility with sign language (their oldest child, Millicent Simmonds’s Regan, happens to be deaf), which allows for silent yet sophisticated communication. And after this origin story of sorts that begins on a baseball field in an idyllic small town and ends with a stylish and brazen battle sequence on Main Street, A Quiet Place Part II cuts to the present day immediately following the events of the prior film, after Lee has died heroically while trying to save his family from the monsters invading their post-apocalyptic compound.

The farm that until then had allowed for self-sufficiency has now been destroyed, and the remaining Abbots—including a newborn whose impending birth infused A Quiet Place with a suffocating sense of foreboding—must go out into an unknown world with few resources and even less hope, visibly stunned by all that they’ve already lost. As Evelyn, Emily Blunt is particularly adept at conveying a compelling mix of shock, grief, and determination as she reels from her husband’s death and leads Marcus, Regan, and her baby down a sand trail toward a signal fire that ends at an old, seemingly abandoned steel mill.

Advertisement

YouTube video

Much of the tension that Krasinski delivers comes from all the ways in which this family might misstep and bring the monsters calling. In one riveting set piece, when the obstacles of a trip wire and a bear trap almost preemptively end their quest to find safety at the steel mill, they’re narrowly saved by Emmett (Cillian Murphy), a family friend—first glimpsed chatting with Lee in the opening flashback—who’s holed himself up with a bottle of vodka after the deaths of his wife and children. The characters are quickly separated as Regan disappears in the night to chase down a hunch that the song playing on repeat on the radio is a clue to the whereabouts of other survivors and Emmett agrees to go after her. The cross-cutting between mirrored horrors elevates familiar genre expectations into a highly sophisticated network of signs and signifiers that work to add depth to the plight of his characters.

The horror genre has always involved the flagging of visual clues to indicate possible future occurrences—the promise offered by Chekhov’s gun—but Krasinski infuses his narrative terrain with meaning without indicating his intentions too obviously. A Quiet Place Part II is thus able to avoid becoming just a series of disconnected events that exist only to ramp up the jump scares. But there’s also no shortage of terror on display here, most deliciously during lingering shots framing a foregrounded character just a few beats longer than we expect them to, making us search the frame for evidence of the monster we know is coming. And the profoundly immersive sound design only adds to the sense of claustrophobic dread.

Krasinski is most in his comfort zone when the importance of family and legacy drives the film’s tension, and as Emmett mostly serves as a necessary tool to help Regan test her theory, and Evelyn is mostly sidelined into the role of protector, it’s the children who take center stage in the film, having learned from their parents the values of determination and resourcefulness. Now the disconsolate adults watch on as the children of the apocalypse fight to create the possibility of a future, and the mirroring that Krasinski develops throughout A Quiet Place Part II has been a clue the whole time to its finale, in which two climactic scenes taking place miles apart from one another become linked in the most clever and moving of ways.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Djimon Hounsou, John Krasinski  Director: John Krasinski  Screenwriter: John Krasinski  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2020  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Richard Scott Larson

Richard Scott Larson has earned fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his debut memoir is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. He’s also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.