A Quiet Place Part II begins on “Day 1”, the day the Earth was invaded by blind Lovecraftian aliens who respond to noise and who really do not like the sound of feedback. We see Lee Abbott (writer/director John Krasinski) make a quick stop for water and fruit on the way to his son’s baseball game, and it seems Lee is such a good neighbor that the grocer (watching a television report about mysterious goings-on in another city) lets Lee leave without paying. Lee’s son Marcus (Noah Jupe) isn’t very good at baseball, but bigger problems soon develop as the aliens’ attack and the city is thrown into chaos.
The bulk of Part II occurs almost 500 days later, and since no one would see this movie without having seen the first one there is no use dwelling on Lee’s fate. Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) and her infant, Marcus, and daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) set out from the family farm with vague plans to connect with some of the few surviving other people. The one person they find – a man called Emmett (Cillian Murphy) who we met in the prologue – isn’t very happy to see them. The first A Quiet Place played the tension created by the monsters off against the tensions and buried guilt within the Abbott family, and the actors gave what could have been a boilerplate horror movie a good deal of texture. Krasinski can’t go back to the well of the family unit this time though, and in opening out the story he loses both suspense and a larger sense of the movie’s humanity. Characters are separated for a good stretch of Part II, and while Regan’s belief that she has made contact with more survivors on an island (the monsters can’t swim) provides motivation it also makes other characters feel like pieces on a chessboard. There is a strand of Part II about hope, grief, and finding a new way to live that’s fairly effective, and then there are Evelyn and Marcus hiding in a hole. Krasinski’s cutting between multiple sets of characters in jeopardy robs all of his set pieces of suspense, and the sequence where Regan is menaced by a crude pack of men feels half thought out.
Children are put in jeopardy in Part II, and I don’t mean just by the monsters. Marcus receives a gruesome injury, Regan’s safety is threatened as described above, and even the baby must endure being repeatedly having his makeshift crib covered up to muffle his cries. Evelyn makes a trip for supplies in perhaps the movie’s most questionable choice, and that sequence is just an excuse to trap Marcus and the baby with a dwindling supply of oxygen. The repeated jeopardizing of the Abbott children feels both cheap and creatively bankrupt, as if Krasinski knew he had to play with our primal fears in a broader way than in Part I. The abrupt ending feels hollow too, since we know that the cycle of terror and violence we have just been through with the Abbotts will no doubt happen again in another context.
What works about Part II comes largely from Millicent Simmonds as Regan. My review of the first Quiet Place also gave Simmonds a lot of the credit for the movie working, and here she is even more confident and empathetic. I do wish Krasinski had gotten more use here out of the first movie’s device of dropping out sound when we’re with Regan, because Part II needed that immersive quality. If the A Quiet Place franchise were a television show it could easily run for years with diminishing returns in the manner of a certain popular zombie series. The effort required for daily survival is a grind that I’m not sure can be repeated a third time in a compelling way, though I have no doubt someone will try.
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