A Quiet Place was one of the most acclaimed films of 2018, which is not bad going for a low-budget alien-invasion splatter-fest. Directed by and co-starring John Krasinski, this high-powered tension-generating machine owed much of its success to a killer concept by Krasinski's co-writers, Bryan Woods and Scott Beck. The idea was that the planet had been overrun by superhumanly strong and fast creatures from outer space who had no sense of sight but had exceptional hearing. If you made a noise, they would hunt you down and impale you on their pointy arms within seconds. The characters had to keep quiet or die – and cinema audiences everywhere kept quiet with them.
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A big part of what made the first film so exciting was the dazzling simplicity of that premise, and the clever ways in which Krasinski, Woods and Beck developed a world in which almost any sound was potentially lethal. During the few minutes when you weren't terrified, you could delight in seeing leaves being used as plates and fluffy pom-poms being used as Monopoly counters. Some of the plot complications were almost as inspired. The central characters were a couple, Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Krasinski's actual wife, Emily Blunt), who lived on a farm with their two children. One reason they had survived was that their daughter, Regan, was deaf (the actress, Millicent Simmonds, is deaf in real life, too) so they had already learnt to communicate using sign language. But Evelyn was heavily pregnant, which meant that, any day now, she and her new baby were bound to make a lot of noise. It's common enough for a character's waters to break in a film, but it's never been as frightening as it was in A Quiet Place.
In fact, Krasinski and his team did an almost flawless job with just four main characters and one farmhouse location, so it felt as if extending the story, and taking it out into the wider world, would be a mistake. A Quiet Place Part II dispels those worries within seconds. It's clear that Krasinski has been careful to keep his patented balance of wit and seriousness, he doesn't stray too far from the family farm, and the plot follows on logically from what went before. Noah Jupe, who plays the couple's son, Marcus, has obviously aged in the time since he was shooting the previous instalment, but otherwise the title A Quiet Place Part II is fully earnt, because the slick sequel genuinely feels like a continuation of its predecessor. You could watch one film and then the other and barely notice where one ended and the other began.
Well, that's not quite true. A Quiet Place began on "Day 89" before jumping to "Day 472". The sequel opens with a flashback to "Day 1", that is, the day when the monsters turn a picture-perfect rural US small town into an abattoir. The family is watching Marcus playing in a school baseball game. They hear a rumble of thunder and see a fireball leaving a trail of black smoke across the blue sky. The baseball game finishes early as everyone rushes to their cars and their homes. And then Krasinski unleashes chaos, including some of the most nerve-jangling extended takes of meticulously choreographed mayhem since Children of Men. Crucially, this prologue has the same stripped-down storytelling as A Quiet Place did, and the same lack of clunking exposition. Krasinski gives us all the information we need, and trusts us to fill in the rest.
After the prologue, the film jumps to "Day 474". Krasinski's own character is dead and the rest of the family has learnt that the squealing feedback whine from Regan's latest hearing aid leaves the creatures disorientated and vulnerable to injury – but again, mercifully, there are no speeches to spell out that back story for us. The remaining family members, including that conveniently content new baby, creep out of the farmhouse and into the wilderness to see if there are any other survivors.
They soon find one, Emmett, a grizzled, bearded widower played by Cillian Murphy, who last experienced a monster apocalypse in 28 Days Later. Emmett has holed up in an abandoned steel plant which, with its thick concrete floors and metal furnaces, proves to be the perfect hiding place from the aliens. Nonetheless, he has so little food that he wants the family to leave him alone and go back to its farm. Regan has other ideas. She believes that if they can reach a nearby radio station, they can broadcast the hearing-aid whine around the country and take the planet back from the fang-faced predators. Like Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in the Alien franchise, she must grow into a gun-toting take-charge heroine. If the theme of the first film was the lengths parents will go to protect their children, this one is about the day when the children are forced to become the protectors and providers themselves.
Inevitably, the action isn't as streamlined as it was in A Quiet Place. As the characters split up to go off on separate, crushingly unwise missions, the plotting loses its laser focus, and the contrivances required to join those missions up again strain the credibility that Krasinski has worked so hard to establish. But the screenplay keeps the surprises coming, and, if none of its set pieces has quite as much tension or quite as many shocks as Evelyn's childbirth scene in A Quiet Place, several of them aren't far off.
We also see a lot more of the toothy monsters than we did before. Back in 2018, they were glimpsed a couple of times on the family farm: now we get to see what these demonic hybrids of the beasties from Alien, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park are really capable of. I don't yelp a lot when I'm watching films, but if my survival relied on my keeping silent during the climactic sequence in A Quiet Place II, I would have been in big trouble. Seeing it in a cinema was a significant factor, though. This is a film that is undoubtedly more effective in the dark, with a top-notch sound system and a huge screen, than it would be on a laptop or a television. If, like Evelyn and her family, you are willing to venture out of your home and into the outside world, you could hardly ask for more suitable or more exhilarating entertainment.
★★★★☆
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A Quiet Place Part II: 'Exhilarating entertainment' - BBC News
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