A Quiet Place is not a movie that needed a denser mythology. The 2018 horror film from John Krasinski had a clever and a simple enough premise that really didn’t require any further elaboration. And the movie ended on that strong note of hope that’s a good catharsis for an apocalyptic story. The origin of those highly sound-sensitive monsters and what’s become of other people were curios, but not much more -and the job of the sequel seems to be clearly to make them such. It certainly can’t rely on premise originality anymore or the mystique of the creatures, not defined in their full proportions until the end of that first movie. It needs some other source of creative momentum.
I’m not sure that A Quiet Place Part II ever finds that, but it does make do alright as it provides more context and charts a narrative direction that will presumably spill over into the rest of this now apparent trilogy. It comes at the cost of that first films’ more appealing minimalism: the long stretches without spoken dialogue and the family not even having an identity beyond their middle American nuclear quintessence. But the exchange is some slightly more interesting character development and world-building, even though in this the movie is also deprived of some of its’ more effective horror.
That being said, the films’ opening sequence, an extended flashback that depicts the start of this alien invasion and reintroduces the Abbott family, is pretty good. It’s paced quite well and expands on the original films’ periphery of focus, showcasing these creatures terrorizing a populace. It does well in illustrating the sheer suddenness of this horror too -the pandemonium comes very fast: a small town baseball game one moment gives way to an alien slaughter within minutes. And of course this part of the film allowed Krasinski (whose character died in the first movie) to reprise his role for a short time. However this sequence does hold back on some levels: rarely is more than one creature on-screen at a time -minimizing the impact of the terror, the set-pieces aren’t particularly inventive, and centering it entirely on the family’s point of view does limit the scope of this episode.
Krasinski’s a decent filmmaker, but he isn’t a terribly dynamic one, and it shows in a lot of his repeat choices in how he constructs his scares. Each jump scare point is fairly obvious by that momentarily relaxed tension and muting of noise; the better horror beats are the ones that build on a situation, such as Marcus (Noah Jupe) being trapped in a space with his infant sister running out of oxygen while being monitored by one of the creatures. Another good example is a sequence at a marina, that draws out enough of a different kind of horror without revolving around the creatures.
Still, you could make the argument this movie is much more action or drama than horror, especially now that at least one of these humans has a weapon against their adversaries. And on that note, Millicent Simmonds is once again the stand-out star of the film. Krasinski clearly paid attention to the reception the young real-life deaf actress received on that first movie, because now her character Regan has been shifted fully into the protagonist role -taking it upon herself to go off in search of more human survivors. Simmonds rises to the challenge very well, her storyline by a healthy margin the more compelling part of the movie. It’s here where the story feels to be expanding into new territory and is amplified by the addition of Cillian Murphy as the new adult lead Emmett –revealed through the flashback to be an old family friend of the Abbotts, now descended into despair. As the ersatz-father figure, he is an improvement on Krasinski in the first film, largely because Murphy is just a much better actor, but also because Emmett’s perspective is a more interesting one to follow than that of the Abbotts –he’s more lost, more desperate, more morally beaten down, and more traumatized, but also more resourceful. He and Regan make for a pretty good pair as they rub off on one another and grow through their journey to possible salvation.
By contrast, the storyline focused on Marcus and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), confined to a shelter in the empty steel foundry where they found Emmett is far less dramatically fulfilling. The former is given something of an arc, first suffering a severe injury and then learning to confront one of the creatures (all the while Krasinski hoping you won’t notice he’s clearly gone through puberty since the movie this one is meant to immediately follow). But for being the top billed star and wife of the director, Blunt has relatively little to do in this film but react to the creatures or the choices of her children. She gets a couple standout moments but otherwise feels entirely underutilized as not even the anchor character of the story thread she’s attached to.
The relationship of those story threads is a bit difficult too, as they progress at vastly different paces, but are united by parallel bouts of suspense or action. It’s quite a practical method of editing, but too often shows the fault lines in the disparity of momentum between the two. Marcus’ plight will give way to Regan’s, and then the film will follow a stretch of her story before returning to him in essentially the same situation. And the big moments of each storyline cut against each other too frequently. It seems like Krasinski came upon a structural device for his ending that he liked, but decided to use it elsewhere in the film as well to the detriment of that culminating moment.
And when I say things like “ending” and “culminating”, I mean them only in a literal sense, because this movie is not finished. A Quiet Place Part II is missing its’ third act, concluding at a decisive moment, but ahead of any of the narratives wrapping up and leaving the film on a cliffhanger. I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie made deliberately incomplete like this since Alita: Battle Angel -though unlike that film this one’s much more likely to get its’ sequel. The film is already short at just over an hour and a half, and the abruptness of its’ ending makes the lack of resolution all the more palpable. It’s a bold choice, even if I don’t know that Krasinski pulls it off all that well.
One thing’s sure though is that he is committed to this franchise, however bizarre of a franchise it may be -he’s working on a spin-off in addition to a third movie, which might just match Zack Snyder’s bewildering commitment to the universe of his Army of the Dead in terms of overzealous dedication to a mediocre idea. But I’ll give it to Krasinski, he got a second decent movie out of it -even if I don’t think it’s as interesting as the first. I’m willing to see where it goes from here.
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