A Quiet Place Part II finally arrives in cinemas over a year late. I saw the first one back in 2018 which feels longer ago than it actually is. I didn’t think we needed a sequel but given that A Quiet Place turned out to be a surprise success, of course a sequel was coming whether you were for it or not. So now we have A Quiet Place Part II.
The film picks up where the first one left off: the father of the Abbott family, Lee, sacrificed himself so that his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), son Marcus (Noah Jupe) and daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) could all live. They found out that the monsters they were hiding from could be defeated using high-frequency audio feedback. Now we get to see what happens next.
The original A Quiet Place gave little information about how the monsters came to be roaming the world. This time we get a prologue that shows how it all began, and this also allows John Krasinski to make a return appearance (as well as directing and writing). It appears that the creatures are aliens who fell from the sky in a meteor. This may reduce their sense of mystery but it’s a worthy sacrifice for a very competently-made opening sequence.
We then come back to the present and the Abbotts have to leave their home. The new-born baby is going to be a big problem in a world where silence is essential. We soon meet one of the film’s few new characters in Emmet (Cillian Murphy) and the action proceeds from there.
A lot of what happens is similar to what we saw in the first film. The characters try to stay quiet and have a few close calls with making loud noises and endangering their lives. It may not be particularly ground-breaking but it’s far from boring – there are a few excellent jump scares but the film isn’t as dependent on those as many other horror films seem to be nowadays. The accent is on tension and suspense, which I’m sure many people will be pleased to hear.
A good actor can often be identified by what they can do beyond just saying the dialogue and of course there’s plenty of scope for the actors to give it their all here. Murphy is a welcome addition to the cast as someone who has been deeply affected by what’s going on, but I might have liked his role to be a little more complex than just someone we don’t know if we can trust or not.
The cinematography is serviceable enough and the score by Marco Beltrami is appropriately atmospheric; they both do what is required of them and from a production standpoint everything looks and sounds decent enough. I think we can expect a brief surge of interest in Bobby Darin’s recording of Beyond The Sea which performs an important plot function.
During the final act we come up against what look like a couple of compulsory clichés of the sci-fi dystopian genre – a group of survivors who have gone completely crazy and will attack anyone on sight, and another group who have managed to remain civilised (and that’s where Djimon Hounsou gets to make an appearance).
The climax feels like it drags for a little too long and even at a runtime of only 97 minutes I wondered a couple of times if the film was on the verge on ending, since that was the impression that I was getting. It took a few more minutes before the end actually came, and of course there is the potential for a third film in the franchise, as well as talk of a spin-off film. The paradox is that the more successful the franchise becomes, the more there’s a risk of it turning into just another horror series with nothing special left about it. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get too big.
A Quiet Place Part II is a decent enough sequel. If you liked the first then there is no reason you won’t like this. It’s more of the same, but on a bigger scale. It might not be the first film you would choose for welcoming yourself back to cinemas, but it’s preferable to having your first cinema film in many months being something low-quality. A Quiet Place Part II does seem to be leading the way among current cinema releases with the only real competition being Cruella. Let’s hope many more high-quality films are on the way.
