Back in 2018, A Quiet Place was just a wonderful surprise, full of prolonged edge-of-seat drama and tension along with wonderfully executed jump scares. And, if you were watching it in the cinema with a crowd of people, it also demonstrated that humans are in fact incapable of keeping quiet. Some people seem to be so incapable of holding onto their bag of popcorn for short periods of time without dropping it all over the floor, they wouldn’t even last five minutes in a world where killer aliens are attracted to the tiniest of sounds that we make.
This highly anticipated sequel should have been released back in March 2020, and I even had tickets booked to go and see it before cinemas closed and everything went on hold in the world. But with cinemas now back in action, A Quiet Place Part 2 was one of the movies I have been most excited about seeing on the big screen. And boy did it not disappoint!
Part 2 starts off by taking us right back to day 1, covering something which we never actually got to find out about in part 1 – the arrival of the aliens and the chaos that followed as they began wiping us all out. It’s also a brief chance for us to witness writer-director John Krasinski back in action on the screen again, following the death of his character Lee at the end of part 1, as well as familiarising us once again with the rest of the Abbott Family – wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) along with children Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Millicent Simmonds). They’ve all gathered to watch a Little League game in the small upstate New York town where they live when something is spotted streaking through the sky towards Earth. The apocalypse is quickly and violently unleashed. And it’s terrifying stuff. It also serves to highlight something that we already know all too well from the first movie – that the Abbotts are a bunch of bad-ass survivors.
Fast forward to day 474. Picking up immediately after the events of part 1, the remaining members of the Abbott family are now leaving behind what’s left of their home and are moving on in search of somewhere new. They may be armed with the knowledge of how to defeat the aliens, but they don’t currently have the ability to be able to deploy it on a larger scale. What they do have though is a baby incapable of understanding the danger all around them, and the importance of keeping quiet while out in the open. And there’s only so long you can keep a baby in a padded box with an oxygen mask. Thankfully, they soon cross paths with Emmett (Cillian Murphy), who we were introduced to at the Little League game back on day 1, and the family are granted a temporary place to stay that’s only marginally safer than being out in the wide open.
Much of the intensity in part 1 came from the moments of pure silence, with the family using sign language to communicate with each other while we held our breath in anticipation before jumping out of our seat when sound eventually shattered the silence. Thankfully, A Quiet Place Part 2 has moments like that in abundance and is at its most terrifying when we are experiencing things as Regan does, deaf to the world and plunged into complete silence.
The Abbott family soon find themselves split into three separate groups, each having their own adventure and each building in intensity as we constantly switch between them. Maybe I was just thrilled to be back at the cinema, watching something so exciting unfold on the big screen, but damn was it good!
A Quiet Place Part 2 expands the world introduced to us in part 1, opening up new threats and introducing new ideas ripe for exploration. For me, part 2 is just as enjoyable and thrilling as part 1, if not more. It’s left wide open for a third part and while I would certainly love to see it, I do worry that the series could start spreading itself just a little too thin or begin moving away from the family aspect that has always been at its heart. For now though, there’s certainly no danger of that and A Quiet Place continues to impress
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Web developer by day, with a movie and TV watchlist that continues to grow as much as my spare time reduces! My favourite movie is Inception and, despite what everyone says, I do not have a man-crush on Tom Cruise.
