It’s hard not to be reminded that A Quiet Place Part II was supposed to come out early last spring, when its release was abandoned due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the film intercuts between Emmett and Regan’s journey and Evelyn and Marcus back at the factory, as they deal with encroaching aliens and the slowly depleting oxygen for the baby. When the young girl strikes out on her own to find a boat, Evelyn convinces the reluctant Emmett to go after her and bring her back. The lone surviving radio-station signal has been broadcasting the song “Beyond the Sea” nonstop, and Regan becomes convinced that the lyrics are a message telling them where to go to seek safety. So, Emmett has lost his wife and his kids, and Evelyn and her kids have lost their husband and father, but there’s little time now for surrogate bonding. (Guess whose corpse we run into during one of the film’s tenser moments.) His children, he tells Evelyn, died on the first day of the invasion. (Guess what else goes wrong eventually.) As bad a time as the Abbotts have had, it seems Emmett has had it even worse. (Guess what goes wrong eventually.) While inside, a clock on a timer reminds them when to step out and breathe more air. For safety, they hide inside a furnace, with a towel placed against the latch to both muffle sound and prevent locking themselves in. Grim salvation comes for Evelyn and her kids in the form of their traumatized and grieving neighbor Emmett (Cillian Murphy), who has set up camp in an abandoned factory. Evelyn also has a newborn baby that she keeps in a case, a little oxygen mask wrapped around the child’s head so as to stifle its cries. In the movie’s present, occurring well after the events of that prologue and the first picture (during which, let’s not forget, Lee Abbott, the father - played by Krasinski himself - was killed), Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) struggles to find safe harbor for her surviving children Regan and Marcus (Noah Jupe, a nervous wreck whose wide-eyed, debilitating terror at everything around him might have felt like an annoying contrivance elsewhere, but here feels extremely relatable). Even as everything goes to hell - as sprinting humans are snatched by leaping, horrifying spider-monsters, and vessels fall from the sky, and traffic lights explode, and cars fly into each other - we also witness how the Abbotts first realized that the aliens were primarily attracted to sound, and how the family’s ability to use sign language served our heroes in good stead. The creatures arrive during a Little League game (of course, this being the Real America™ and all) and the ensuing mayhem - shot in intercutting long takes, with the sound dropping in and out as the camera’s perspective switches among the members of the Abbott family (the daughter, Regan, played by Millicent Simmonds, is deaf) - offers a perfect example of carefully calibrated onscreen chaos. He proves his mastery right from the opening sequence, a stomach-gnawing flashback to the day the sound-seeking aliens first came to the quiet town of Millbrook. With A Quiet Place Part II, John Krasinski confirms that the taut brilliance of the first A Quiet Place was no fluke. I’m not sure how America’s most charisma-free movie star wound up becoming one of our most effective suspense directors, but here we are. Emily Blunt and Noah Jupe in A Quiet Place Part II.
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