I still cannot believe that John Krasinski got moviegoers to be silent back in 2018. His box-office smash “A Quiet Place” (co-written with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) went beyond caring about characters trying to survive in quiet—it taught uneasy audiences to follow suit, filling theaters with silent observers.
No moviegoer would want Krasinski to repeat this terror exactly for a sequel, but the changes he’s made in this follow-up then feel especially brash: it’s bigger, faster, louder, and more typical for the horror blockbuster genre. “Part II” has got approximately triple the amount of dialogue as the original, and its horror is far more literal and straightforward. If you were more scared of the sound-hating, generic looking crab/spider monsters with the Venom-like heads from the first movie than you were the visceral challenge of complete silence, “A Quiet Place Part II” is especially for you.
In writing and directing this sequel, Krasinski proves his intelligence and his non-subversive priorities when it comes to being a genre director. He also asserts his talent at orchestrating tense life-or-death scenes with an exciting sense of when to go slow and when to floor it. In its best moments, “A Quiet Place Part II” reminded me of Steven Spielberg cutting loose with “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” letting his beasts rampage through a new environment in a staggering way. Even if this sequel remains firmly in the shadows of the original, I wanted part three as soon as it was over.
The first movie ended essentially at its climax, with our heroes, the Abbotts, finally tipping the scales after 400-some days of terror under their noise-slaying captors. “Part II” begins with a deliciously cruel reset, going back to day one of all this, when no one knew anything. We as audience members know what comes eventually (Krasinski’s plotting treats the first movie as required viewing), and that makes a scene at a Little League baseball game—an open field of noise—an especially nerve-rattling, jack-in-the-box sequence in a movie that has plenty of them.
The match is called off when something especially big blows up in the sky; everyone shuffles home. Many citizens don’t stand a chance after the aliens suddenly slam into town, sending Lee Abbott (Krasinski) into hiding with his daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), while mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) frantically drives with her two sons. This is like a high-octane victory lap for what Krasinski accomplished in the first movie especially as its bracing violence reacclimatizes us to fearing sound, while locking us into different characters’ points-of-view with long takes as they try to navigate pure chaos. “A Quiet Place Part II” announces here that it’s playing a different and considerably less interesting game, but it’s a bravura sequence.
“Part II” then jumps right to the end of the last one, moments after Evelyn victoriously cocked a shotgun. With their family's barn burning, and patriarch Lee dead in the fields, it’s time to leave home. Carrying her newborn baby, Evelyn travels with her daughter Regan and son Marcus (Noah Jupe) off the sand path that had previously been laid by Lee, past the gravesite of their young son from the beginning of the first movie. Regan has her cochlear implant in hand, looking to further weaponize it after its feedback proved at the end of the first movie to give the monsters debilitating headaches (or something like that). Her search for more people sets them on a course for a signal, and the unknown of humanity.
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