Admittedly, I was a little nervous about returning to the multiplex. I am a fully vaccinated adult, I wear a mask anyway in most places in part because it’s easier to put people at ease, and I have been going out places more often since I was vaccinated. Combine that with falling infection rates in my county, the movie theater’s own mask and distancing requirements, and the CDC saying it is safe for vaccinated people to go out unmasked, and it should be fine for me. But this was the first time in over a year that I spent time with a group of strangers indoors, so I will admit to being a little nervous all the same, something I am sure will get better the more I do it.
All that is to say that that mood actually made my experience with A Quiet Place Part II better. What better way to feel during a horror movie than a little nervous on top of everything else?
Opening with a flashback to the day the creatures arrived and starting killing anything that made noise in the small town where the first movie was set, we soon cut to sometime after that first movie as the surviving members of the Abbott family are on the move. Mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt), deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), nervous son Marcus (Noah Jupe), and the as near as I can tell unnamed baby spotted smoke on the horizon and head off to see if there are other survivors now that they have a way to kill the creatures using Regan’s cochlear implant to screw with the creatures’ hearing long enough to kill them when they are vulnerable. They manage to find Emmett (Cillian Murphy), a friend of the Abbotts’ from town who was surviving in an abandoned factory, but he’s not all that willing to offer assistance. He’s been living in fear of these things for over a year. Why chance things now?
If the first movie was about guilt over the death of a younger sibling and reconciling the fractured relationship between Regan and her father Lee (writer/director John Krasinski, appearing in this movie only in the opening flashback scene), this one deals more with overcoming fear as seen with both Marcus and Emmett. Marcus, we see, has had anxiety issues for quite some time even before the monsters showed up, and Emmett has lost too much in the previous year, but for survival to continue, the two of them will need to find some level of courage to prevail.
I had wondered, given the original movie got noticeably less tense once the creatures were finally visible, if Krasinski would be able to build any sort of tension when the creatures and their methods are known. On the contrary, he did a very good job because we knew the creatures and their tricks. The opening scene, with Krasinski’s Lee running errands before going to his son’s Little League game, set me on edge with every little every day noise from an aluminum bat hitting a ball to a radio to a panting dog, making me wonder when the things would finally pop up and how quickly would the many people running around figure out what their deal was. Suffice to say, the movie found ways to keep the tension high.
That, I think, is the big strength of these movies. Krasinski set out some rules, some more of which are revealed in this movie, and he lets the audience see how closely his characters follow them for their own survival, especially since these things hear as well as they do. Since Emmett wasn’t living with the Abbotts, he came up with his own unwritten survival guide, but surviving is not the same as thriving, and whether or not there is a Part III, it will very much depend on whether or not the surviving characters can do more than just survive, and the resiliency of the characters suggests that, perhaps much like the real-world pandemic, there is cause for hope now.
Grade: A-
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