Director: John Krasinski
Starring: Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cillian Murphy,
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 98 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2021

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Rating notes: Horror themes and violence

This American horror film is a sequel to the 2018 film, A Quiet Place, and John Krasinski wrote and directed both movies. In the film, Blunt, Simmonds, and Jupe reprise their original roles. The film continues the original story, and describes what happens to the remaining members of the Abbott family, as they search for post-apocalyptic safety. Members do everything they can to avoid the creatures that lie in the forest, and in the surrounding towns. Since the last film, the marauding creatures have heightened their hearing, and continue to locate their victims by sound. Just as before, the Abbott family lives in silence to avoid them, and every member of the family communicates by sign language, or whispering, under pain of death.

Evelyn Abbott (Blunt) and Lee Abbott (Krasinski) are the parents of Regan (Simmonds) and Marcus (Jupe). Lee and his child were killed by creatures in the original movie, and Lee appears in flashback sequences in this sequel. The Abbott family is now made up of Evelyn, Regan and Marcus, and Evelyn’s newborn baby.

Lee sacrificed himself in the original film by drawing a creature away from his family to protect his wife, his children, and Evelyn’s unborn child. As with the original, this is a clever horror movie that avoids bouts of protracted aggression to develop its tension. It is well directed, and builds up an incredible degree of escalating dread. The original 2018 film took a novel idea, and the sequel expands it coherently by building character development scarily around it. The film does not aim to capture viewers’ attention by simply showing marauding creatures. The context of dread is blended into the film in harmony with its plot-line, but everything that looks routine has a good chance of turning out to be threatening as well.

After Lee’s death, the remaining members of the Abbott family discover that sound from a cochlear implant in Regan’s ear weakens the predators’ level of aggression. Outside, they discover an alien-infested world, and unexpectedly come on a mysterious outlaw character, called Emmett (Murphy); he is a risk-taking stranger, who has lost his wife, and he acts to help them. The sequel effectively imparts the message that “danger lies everywhere”. The outside world has new survivors, not all of them friendly, and there are more monsters.

Because of astute direction, Part II is as tense and terrifying as the original, and maintains the tension in creatively different ways to keep the story-line interesting and absorbing.

The sequel has no restricted classification rating to reflect special caution. The presence of copious blood and gore is absent, and viewers will inevitably find themselves eagerly anticipating “A Quiet Place Part III”, so good is the series. Character development in the original was one of its primary strengths, and this sequel takes the same approach several steps further, by illustrating how family members have grown in their understanding of how best they can help each other. In Part II, human resilience out of necessity comes to the fore, and the film strongly reinforces the thrust of the original 2018 movie by emphasising the importance of love and trust, good parenting, togetherness, and family bonding.

This is a well-made horror movie which demonstrates the potential for terror that lies embedded in ordinary events. It is more ambitious and adventurous than the original, but continuity of spirit with the 2018 film has been maintained. The direction by John Krasinksi is just as compelling, the theme of togetherness is well preserved, and the quality of acting continues to impress.

Peter W. Sheehan