Horror Movie Review: A Quiet Place Part II (2021)

A Quiet Place Part II is a 2021 American horror film and the sequel to 2018’s A Quiet Place. The film was written, produced, and directed by John Krasinski.

During a baseball game, the Abbott family – wife Evelyn, husband Lee, deaf daughter Regan, and sons Marcus and Beau – and other spectators witness a strange cloud-like object hurtle towards the Earth. Hostile extraterrestrial creatures attack and begin slaughtering people. The blind creatures possess armored skin, have extraordinary speed and strength, and track victims with hypersensitive hearing, attacking anything that makes a noise.

Over a year later, the creatures have killed much of the Earth’s population, including Beau and Lee. Regan discovered that high-frequency audio feedback incapacitates the creatures. She devises a makeshift method of transmitting the noise from her cochlear implant through a portable microphone, making the creatures killable.

With their home destroyed, the family searches for other survivors. Entering a fenced-off area, Evelyn accidentally sets off a sound alarm, alerting the creatures. As they flee, Marcus steps into a bear trap, attracting a creature with his screams. Regan and Evelyn kill it, free Marcus, then run into an abandoned steel foundry. An old friend, Emmett, appears and takes them to his soundproof underground hideout. Emmett, who recently lost his family, refuses to help further and says they cannot stay.

Marcus hears the song “Beyond the Sea” playing on the radio, which Emmett says has aired continuously for four months. Regan determines it is a hint that survivors are on a nearby island. She theorizes that if she can reach the radio tower, the hearing aid’s high-frequency noise can be broadcast so other survivors can weaponize the signal. She secretly ventures out alone to find the island. Emmett finds Regan and saves her from a creature. Regan persuades Emmett to help complete her mission.

Is Regan right? Could the radio tower be the answer? Watch and find out.

Honestly, I was so disappointed in this movie. A Quiet Place was perfection, and to go from that to this was an absolute travesty. For starters, there’s not really any progression in this movie. It literally ends the exact same way as the first, copy and paste. Did the studio ask them to drag it out into a trilogy?

The acting was great, of course. But what was the reason for killing off Lee? Honestly, they just replace him with another dad anyway. Except Emmett is paper thin and stereotypical. A Quiet Place II should have opened with his backstory so we would actually be able to care about him and his story in any way. Additionally, I was very surprised at Evelyn’s arc. She is literally just there to have babies and watch the kids. After the first film I envisioned she would become Ripley-esque but she just gets replaced by another man. I feel like the baby idea didn’t carry over well to the sequel at all (a sequel wasn’t even necessary!).

Now, let’s talk effects. So, Alien is the most famous alien horror movie out there and it still holds up and looks great to this day. But this movie doesn’t even hold up during the year of its release. The monsters look terrible. It makes me furious because it’s so incredibly lazy! There is only ever a single monster on screen at any one time so they would only have to make one using practical effects. I expected way more for a big blockbuster movie and clearly money was spent on hiring new, pointless actors. It’s not even possible to praise the design of the monsters either because it’s very standard. The first instalment had it right – less is more – especially when your monsters look shit.

I’m not sure what went wrong but I think it’s simply a lack of real tension and a fuck ton of dumb decisions when the first movie was so clever and calculated. The family always made such smart decisions and suddenly, without Lee, they’re all a bunch of morons. Clearly he was the only one stopping them from killing themselves.

Overall, A Quiet Place II is a huge leap away from A Quiet Place. It turns a genius concept with subtlety into a generic sequel that goes against the philosophy of the first. Instead of being quiet and careful, they are loud and careless. It’s also the ultimate jump scare movie, with any tension coming from that.