

Her search for more people sets them on a course for a signal, and the unknown of humanity. Regan has her cochlear implant in hand, looking to further weaponize it after its feedback proved at the end of the first movie to give the monsters debilitating headaches (or something like that). Carrying her newborn baby, Evelyn travels with her daughter Regan and son Marcus ( Noah Jupe) off the sand path that had previously been laid by Lee, past the gravesite of their young son from the beginning of the first movie. With their family's barn burning, and patriarch Lee dead in the fields, it’s time to leave home. “Part II” then jumps right to the end of the last one, moments after Evelyn victoriously cocked a shotgun. “A Quiet Place Part II” announces here that it’s playing a different and considerably less interesting game, but it’s a bravura sequence. This is like a high-octane victory lap for what Krasinski accomplished in the first movie especially as its bracing violence reacclimatizes us to fearing sound, while locking us into different characters’ points-of-view with long takes as they try to navigate pure chaos. Many citizens don’t stand a chance after the aliens suddenly slam into town, sending Lee Abbott (Krasinski) into hiding with his daughter Regan ( Millicent Simmonds), while mother Evelyn ( Emily Blunt) frantically drives with her two sons. The match is called off when something especially big blows up in the sky everyone shuffles home. We as audience members know what comes eventually (Krasinski’s plotting treats the first movie as required viewing), and that makes a scene at a Little League baseball game-an open field of noise-an especially nerve-rattling, jack-in-the-box sequence in a movie that has plenty of them. “Part II” begins with a deliciously cruel reset, going back to day one of all this, when no one knew anything. The first movie ended essentially at its climax, with our heroes, the Abbotts, finally tipping the scales after 400-some days of terror under their noise-slaying captors.


Even if this sequel remains firmly in the shadows of the original, I wanted part three as soon as it was over. In its best moments, “A Quiet Place Part II” reminded me of Steven Spielberg cutting loose with “ The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” letting his beasts rampage through a new environment in a staggering way. He also asserts his talent at orchestrating tense life-or-death scenes with an exciting sense of when to go slow and when to floor it. In writing and directing this sequel, Krasinski proves his intelligence and his non-subversive priorities when it comes to being a genre director.
