Mark Reviews Movies: A QUIET PLACE: PART II

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 27, 2021

Regardless of its flaws, A Quiet Place served as an efficient and quite effective mechanism for generating plenty of tension. The same can almost be said of A Quiet Place: Part II, which picks up immediately after the events of the first film. It's efficient, for sure, in that its plot—like the sequel's predecessor—is primarily an excuse for a series of scenes of suspense. It's only occasionally effective, though. Returning writer/director John Krasinski has omitted any reason to care why these characters move from place to place, from complication to complication, and from suspense sequence to suspense sequence.

The first film, which Krasinski co-wrote with the non-returning Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, also didn't give us much in that department, but it did give us just enough. In it, as you may recall, a family tried to survive amidst an invasion of monsters, which can hear—and will attack the source of—any sound above a whisper, while also dealing with the trauma of such a world-changing event and the specific grief/guilt of losing a loved one to the creatures. The foundation, although a bit flimsy if one took a moment to consider some of the logic in the script's mechanics, was fine in terms of what it needed to do. It gave us a reason to care about these characters, not to mention worry about their fates. After all, a film that opens with an innocent kid being killed by a monster means business.

That's why, for example, Krasinski's character Lee only appears in the sequel's prologue: a flashback return to the first day of the monster attack. The sequence, which is completely unnecessary in terms of narrative (Do we really need to know that these creatures came from space?), does instantly remind us how well Krasinski establishes, develops, and pays off a big or limited sequence, filled with tension and scares.

On an ordinary day in a small town, Lee, his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), their daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and their younger-and-later-to-be-killed son cheer on elder son Marcus (Noah Jupe) at a baseball game. A mass of fiery rock or something falls through the sky, sending the crowd scattering. The resulting sequence, as we see the super-hearing monsters hunt for and attack the population, is most impressive in how it gives us little moments of chaos (Evelyn trying to race a speeding bus, with one of the monsters on its windshield) and suspense (Lee and Regan hiding in a bar, where some people aren't quick to comprehend that they need to be quiet), pointing toward a broader sense of destruction and terror.

There are other such scenes (although none of them is anywhere near the scale of the opening) throughout the rest of the story. It begins after Evelyn, Regan, Marcus, and the family's newborn baby have defeated or evaded the creatures that overran the shelter of the family farm (Lee, of course, sacrificed himself to save his kids). They need to find a new safe and, well, quiet place, so they travel to a nearby abandoned factory (an idea almost as terrible as its current occupant using noise-making booby traps to alert him of intruders). After a close call, they're saved by Emmett (Cillian Murphy), a friend from the pre-invasion days, who is alone and not particularly eager for company.

The story here amounts to a series of subplots. Regan and Emmett try to find a radio station on an island off the coast, where the girl believes she can transmit a signal that will incapacitate the monsters. Evelyn has to go on a search for additional oxygen tanks, which ensure that her baby can breathe inside the casket-like crib the parents' constructed for the newborn (Upping the claustrophobic ante is an industrial oven, where people can hide without being heard—and, as becomes an immediate concern, won't be heard if they're trapped inside). Marcus has to tend to the baby while everyone does his or her own thing.

What's surprising here is that, despite the obvious setups from the previous film and within this one, all of these characters seem only affected by the respective task at hand. Lee is dead, but his surviving family members barely acknowledge this fact. Emmett is a long-grieving father and husband, and while Marcus finds a room that shows the extent of the man's inability to let go, the discovery only serves as an excuse for the kid to make a lot of noise.

The story and these various plots keep moving forward, and everything is framed in terms of what needs to be done and why it matters to the story. The characters (especially Evelyn, who's basically out on an uneventful errand, and Marcus, who's just babysitting) mostly exist to ensure that something is—or is in the process of—being done at any given moment.

When those tension-filled sequences do arrive, though, Krasinski almost tricks us into accepting this run-around plot and these shallow characters as being enough. To be clear, the filmmaker shows a deft hand in crafting the various suspense sequences—both small and, when a pair of characters finds a seemingly monster-free oasis, big. The plot and characters of A Quiet Place: Part II are here to justify the existence of those sequences—nothing else and too transparently so.

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