Well-Made Thrills Drown Out A Quiet Place Part II‘s Increasingly Noisy Flaws

Serving as both prologue and epilogue to the original film, flashing back to the day the sound-averse killer aliens landed on Earth, A Quiet Place Part II is an exercise in diminishing returns. As our Tim Grierson pointed out in his review of the first high-concept movie, “the risk with such films is that, eventually, we’ll grow accustomed to the conceit and get restless.” As the sequel’s already been delayed a full year since its planned release date, that restlessness has perhaps already set in on a larger cultural level. Even if much of A Quiet Place’s power didn’t come from its relatively restrained worldbuilding and potent use of its near-silent sensory gimmick, that’s a long time for its simple hook to live out in the pop cultural world. But thanks to the strengths of its core ensemble and returning director John Krasinski’s ability behind the camera, A Quiet Place Part II’s technical merits mostly drown out the franchise’s increasingly noisy flaws.

Picking up directly after the first film, the surviving Abbott family—Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Marcus (Noah Jupe), Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and a nameless newborn—mourn the sacrifice of patriarch Lee (Krasinski) by abandoning their somewhat busted, partially ablaze post-apocalyptic compound in search of a mysterious bonfire they spot on the horizon. They’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with these monsters thanks to the discovery that they hate the frequency produced by Regan’s cochlear implant—though with that baby in tow and their home apparently no longer inhabitable (for some reason), the family’s clearly in need of a more permanent solution.

This necessarily questions and attempts to expand that aforementioned contained stage-setting. How can this weakness be exploited on a larger scale, and how did the world beyond the Abbott home cope? These threads unfurl somewhat arbitrarily as the world grows bigger and monsters that were once teased crash about the screen with violent abandon. We see a bit more of the nasty, Last of Us production design; Venom-like aliens that ostensibly hate noise scream their fleshy, exploded-pie-chart-looking heads off. In many ways, Part II suffers from some of the same follow-up problems afflicting The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Additionally, when that magic reveal is spent up, cynicism naturally follows. Emmett (Cillian Murphy), the family friend from the Before Times waiting at that bonfire who’s suffered more and retained less than the Abbotts, embodies this messy sourness.

Since Krasinski doesn’t seem very interested in exploring the ideas brought up by colliding his parties, he could have benefited from once again having the purity of structure set up by A Quiet Place co-writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck—and that’s not even considering the film’s exceptionally fun selection of “how does that work” nitpick bait. But despite his screenwriting shortcomings, Krasinski still proves himself a capable horror director.

Not only are the film’s actors so good that they sell ridiculous ideas or freshen familiar situations—Simmonds is still a standout, at once the most expressive and grounded of the group, while Murphy shifts with a dying animal’s dangerous melancholy—Krasinski understands how to play to their physicality, keeping a tight focus on small actions and their potentially large consequences. Yes, people are once again taking very slow footsteps. But when he’s telling stories through these silent, zeroed-in processes, climbing through a window can be far more compelling than an alien barreling through a train car. Regan reaching over to turn the ASL-illiterate Emmett’s head so that his lips are easier for her to read is a small gesture, but one captured with enough focus and gravity that its implied closeness helps overcome their underwritten relationship.