A Quiet Place Part II

When writer-director John Krasinski was approached with the idea of doing a sequel to his 2018 horror film, A Quiet Place, he was hesitant, as he thought the film worked well enough as a stand alone feature.  Reading about this, I agreed with him.  His film was a perfect little cinematic short story that was beautifully told, and even wound up as one of my picks as the best films of the year.  However, I guess Krasinski was ultimately swayed into signing on, as here is A Quiet Place Part II.  And while it does not have quite the impact of the original, it's still a wonderfully intense and visual experience.

Watching the film, you can kind of sense the trouble the filmmaker had with going back to his post-apocalyptic world where a family tries to survive a series of attacks by massive spider-like aliens that look like something out of a Silent Hill video game (And I mean that in a good way.  Anyone who has played that franchise, and not just watched the inferior film adaptations, knows that they had some of the most creative and nightmare-inducing creature designs around.), and are drawn to their victims by sound.  In the first film, I got drawn in by how it set up this deadly world, and showed the different ways that the family survived, mostly by communicating through sign language, and making as little sound as possible.  In expanding the world after the first movie, Krasinski relies on introducing a few new characters, but not many elements.  What is here is very good, but there's little that's new, and some of the characters this time are given little to do.

One of my favorite aspects of the first is how the film dropped us into its world and allowed us to figure out what was going on by showing abandoned newspaper reports that were left behind on the streets.  This time, we get a flashback (labeled "Day 1") of how the invasion all began, which turned a Little League baseball game into a waking nightmare.  This opening 15 minute sequence allows us to be introduced to the original family members, including father Lee (Krasinski), mother and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), along with children Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe), and toddler Beau (Dean Woodward).  From there, the film jumps ahead to not long after the events of the first, and the surviving family members (plus Evelyn's new baby).  They are still suffering from the physical and emotional scars they endured from the previous film's climax, and have been forced to leave their previous home, and seek shelter with a former friend of the family, Emmett (Cillian Murphy).

From there, the movie splits into different directions as the various characters are faced with different tasks.  Emmett and Regan leave to search out a mysterious radio signal that may lead to other survivors, Evelyn must venture into town to look for more medication, and young Marcus is left alone to care for the baby, as he hurts his leg in a scene early in the film, and can't venture out.  Like the original, A Quiet Place Part II embraces minimal storytelling, opting instead to mostly tell its story visually and with little dialogue and sound as possible.  However, the mystery has been lessened a little, as we get much better views of the aliens this time around (they mostly kept to the shadows before), and the movie relies on jump scares a bit more than before, most of which are easy to predict.  Still, Krasinski is once again able to bring us into his world, and at times brilliantly puts us in the shoes of the character Regan, who is deaf (as is the actress who plays her in real life), by killing all the sound at key moments, and letting us see events through a silent world.

Speaking of Regan, and young Millicent Simmonds who plays her, her role has been greatly expanded here, and Simmonds is quite wonderful.  I would have liked if she had gotten more to do with the returning cast (she spends a majority of her time with Cillian Murphy), but she shows herself quite capable at carrying a majority of the film.  This also leads to one of my big complaints, however, which is that the rest of the returning cast are not given as much.  Emily Blunt gets some good scenes here, but not as many as last time, and young Noah Jupe mostly gets to sit in a vault for most of his screen time. Again, this may all go back to Krasinski's initial fear of doing a sequel in the first place.  What's here is good and very strong, but it lacks the impact and the character bonding that made the first not just a thriller roller coaster, but an emotional one as well. 

At the very least, the movie understands what worked before, and builds on it for the most part.  If it's not quite as memorable as before, that might be due to the fact that a Part II was not entirely needed in the first place.  Of course, the film's final moments state that this is far from the end, so I'm sure Krasinski and his team will be asked to stretch the concept out for one more movie at least.  I kind of hope he doesn't, though.

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