Like many, I didn’t get to go to a movie theater in 2020. For a movie reviewer, that really stinks. I appreciated movie studios making certain theater movies available on-demand at home, but I missed the nostalgia of going to a loud theater, selling a kidney for a bag of popcorn, and enjoying a movie with a crowd of strangers.
Finally, things have changed enough that I was able to get back to the theater recently, and “A Quiet Place Part II” was, without a doubt, the movie I wanted to return with. An intense and frightening drama that forces a full theater into silence before making everyone collectively jump is just what the doctor ordered. And I’m rather surprised to write this, because it’s hardly ever the case, but I liked this sequel more than I liked the original.
And I liked the first “A Quiet Place” a lot. It’s just that in the sequel, we don’t need to spend time creating the family dynamic, because that was done in the first movie. Instead, the script can get right to the survival terror and keep the foot on the proverbial pedal. It’s incredibly tense. My heart rate was up throughout. With a movie built around silence, any lack thereof is jolting with brutal builds and jumpscares.
Writer/director John Krasinski is briefly in the film as the father/husband Lee, in the opening “Day 1” segment that shows the initial invasion. Then the story jumps to where the first movie left off, with his wife Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) and her children trying to stay alive and find others. Blunt is such a great actress. She’s not the center of the story by any means, but she is brilliant as the center of the family, holding everyone together in the darkest of times. She’s visibly exhausted, but keeps putting one foot in front of the other and helping her children stay calm, even when it’s clear that she’s barely hanging on herself.
Evelyn takes care of the kids, but having a newborn in a world where noise leads to death is the most nerve wracking piece of story. More critical to this film is oldest child Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who takes it upon herself to try and help even more people. She goes on a quest to hunt down an island radio station to broadcast the feedback sound they’ve learned can incapacitate the predators.
Family friend to the Abbotts, Emmett (Cillian Murphy) emerges in the sequel, but whereas Krasinski’s character Lee gave strength to his family in the first film, Emmett doesn’t appear to have any left to give. He has lost his son and wife, and in a world in which many survivors have turned into something dark and vicious, the grizzled Emmett seems to be on that path. That is, until his conversations with young Regan help him regain his morality by following the lead of the determined and hopeful girl. Emmett tells Regan that he sees her dad in her, and it’s a compliment that evokes both pride and tears.
Emmett and Regan briefly encounter a dangerous group of survivors who look and act like they’ve reverted to more primal days, and I wish we could’ve seen more of them. It’d be fascinating to see how they changed so much in just over a year since the invasion.
The alien creatures themselves are slightly less scary this time around, likely because they’re more visible than they were in the first installment. There’s something to be said about leaving more to the imagination, and when they were zooming around in a flash in the first movie they were terrifying. They meander a lot more in this one, and they’re inconsistent in their brutality. They seem to just knock people around more instead of brutally killing them, but maybe that was so they could keep it PG-13. They also go from tearing through a steel door in one scene to struggling to cut through a fabric convertible roof in another. That said, there are more of them this time around, so it’s a tradeoff.
This film also reminds us that this world has more to survive than just the creatures. Without easily accessible medicine to treat injuries or sickness, living gets a lot harder. And no matter what’s going on in the world, you need air to breathe. There’s much more to be concerned about than just noise.
Nevertheless, the fear of noise is constant, and so is the stress that comes with it. I realized near the end that my body had been clenched throughout, kind of like pulling your feet under the covers at night, just in case. I loved it. It’s been a while since I felt like that from a movie, and I’m so happy that my first movie back in a traditional theater in over a year could give that to me.
4.5/5
“A Quiet Place Part II” is now playing in theaters.
