![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The first film told us nothing about the aliens’ origins and, apart from its shivery prologue, “A Quiet Place Part II” tells us little more. Sure, some of it fell apart on closer inspection (a baby, in this economy?), but Krasinski was a deft enough storyteller to keep you fully in the moment with a canny mix of Spielbergian pathos and Hitchcockian concision. The strength of the first “Quiet Place” lay in its ruthless concentration and pared-to-the-bone storytelling: By turning every creak, crash and unstifled scream into a potentially fatal mistake, the movie cut the exposition to a minimum and kept its focus on the minutiae of the Abbotts’ moment-by-moment survival. That’s an honest if obvious insight and a legitimate premise for a sequel, even if the execution here ultimately feels more prosaic than inspired. But monsters aren’t all they have to fear in a world where evil - another word for it is indifference - often wears a disquietingly human face. Still, they practically walk on tiptoe, their bare feet cracked and bandaged (a grimly persuasive touch), lest they rouse the monsters’ attention. And so begins this sequel proper, as the now-widowed Evelyn and her kids - Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and an unnamed newborn - venture uneasily beyond their upstate New York farmhouse, armed with guns and audio equipment: They’re literally amped for action. Amid the unfolding chaos, Lee and Evelyn Abbott (real-life spouses Krasinski and Emily Blunt) narrowly escape with their children in a harrowing smash-and-slash action sequence that provides an early clue about the monsters’ extraordinary powers of hearing.įrom there the story flashes forward to the triumphant final moments of the first “Quiet Place,” in which the surviving Abbotts realize the monsters’ greatest strength might in fact be their greatest weakness. The calm of a small upstate New York town is shattered by the arrival of these fast-moving extraterrestrial demons with their Venus-flytrap teeth, armored bodies, lethal claws and suggestively gooey ear canals. In the first film, Krasinski kept his creatures off-screen for teasingly long stretches this time, knowing we’ve already seen them in action, he unleashes them from the get-go. Those sounds - the last you’ll hear for a while, notwithstanding the dread-inducing shudders of Marco Beltrami’s score - accompany a tense opening flashback to the terrible day those monsters first arrived. Sitting masked and vaccinated in an underpopulated screening room, I felt pretty safe and even contented as the lights went down, plunging me into a harrowing yet oddly comforting world of screaming adults, screeching monsters and buildings being torn asunder. ![]() For anyone anxiously returning to the multiplex after a long absence, there are certainly less nerve-rattling cinematic options, though also less enjoyable ones. The release was delayed for more than a year, and as a result, one of the last movies some of my press colleagues saw in a theater in 2020 is one of the first movies I’ve seen in a theater in 2021. Three years later, the hotly anticipated “A Quiet Place Part II” is before us, and it, too, is a movie to give you second thoughts about breathing too heavily in a theater - though not, of course, for entirely the same reasons.ĭirected, like its predecessor, by John Krasinski (who also wrote the script, this time without his prior collaborators Bryan Woods and Scott Beck), “A Quiet Place Part II” was all set to open last March before COVID-19 shutdowns began. It was a movie that cried out - OK, demanded in a whisper - to be seen on the big screen, provided you didn’t dare clear your throat, munch popcorn or uncrinkle that bag of Sour Patch Kids. Here was a diabolically smart and scary thriller that turned sound itself into a weapon: a tour de force of shush-pense. When “A Quiet Place” was released in 2018, its high-concept premise became a terrific word-of-mouth hook, if “word-of-mouth” makes sense for a film that demanded total silence from its characters and viewers alike. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. ![]()
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