There are, so the cliched-inclined tell us, only two things that are certain in life – death and taxes.
To this exceptionally short and likely inaccurate list, a great many people might also add, that the sequel to a hit movie will inevitably be a woeful and unmitigated mess, or at the very least, a crushing disappointment compared to the dizzyingly successful heights of its predecessor.
While that truism is often validated, there are thankfully some fearsomely good exceptions such as A Quiet Place II, the John Krasinski-helmed (he both wrote and produced) film which takes up the apocalyptic tale begun in A Quiet Place which saw the Abbott family among the few, very quiet survivors of an invasion of blind, sound-sensitive and enthusiastically carnivorous monsters from outer space.
Not of course that that was made explicitly clear in the first film.
With an elegantly economical style of storyelling that proved to be as intensely emotionally resonant as it was terrifyingly tense, A Quiet Place turned a big epic event into a fearsomely intimate experience where we watched Lee and Evelyn Abbott (real life couple John Krasinki and Emily Blunt) and their three children, deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Beau Cade Woodward in the first film; Dean Woodward in the sequel) working hard to survive in a world where the slightest noise could spell your doom.
Theirs is a world of silence, aided in no small part by the fact that the family has long communicated by sign language for obvious reasons, and quickly worked out that the monsters hunted by sound and that being quiet was the key to their survival.
While we don’t see where the monsters come from in A Quiet Place, we do know that the world they have created by their arrival, is a dark and terrifying one, where life is constrained not simply by the need to minimise all noise but by the fact that the earth is no longer a free domain for anyone.
A Quiet Place II takes us deeper into this frightening world where – SPOILER ALERT! LOOK AWAY NOW IF YOU HAVEN”T SEEN THE FIRST FILM – Evelyn is now a single parent to Regan and Marcus and her baby son born in the wake of Beau’s death, a task complicated by the fact that her newest child has no idea that his cries could spell their collective end.
To help keep him as quiet as possible, Evelyn hides in a giant-sized picnic hamper to which she affixes an oxygen mask which fees her son oxygen when he can’t be out in the world making a fuss.
Safety in an illusion in A Quiet Place II since you are only one snapping twig or knocked can away from being ripped limb from limb but even so, Evelyn decides to see if the fires burning up on the mountains around the Appalachian valley they call home might offer some fellow survivors with whom to shelter.
It’s a choice that almost comes back to haunt them but just in the nick of time Evelyn and her kids are rescued by Emmette (Cillian Murphy), an old friend who has been sheltering in a ruined factory with his family but who is now alone in a fortress that he isn’t willing to share.
He knows he’s not safe, and Evelyn knows that any safety offered by the rusty factory is fleeting at best, but it is better than nothing and establishes the idea of safety as a major theme throughout A Quiet Place II.
The theme finds itself expressed not only in the film’s exploration of what it means to be safe when what was once the standard bearer for safety, a peaceful, civilised and orderly society based on implicitly-agreed values, no longer exists, but how people react to its obvious and life-endangering absence.
This is partially realised in the way the film begins with a recounting of Day 1 of the monsters’ arrival when a baseball game, at which the whole town seems to be in attendance, descends into a frantic, and fatally, extraordinarily noisy scramble to escape nightmares sprung to life.
The contrast before the bucolic loveliness of the Abbott family at rest and play versus day 474 when we see them dirty, beleaguered and desperate for a place to go after Lee’s death, is stark, its boldly confronting lines accentuated by the film’s predilection for utter and total silence in many key scenes.
It is likely you have never been in a cinema as quiet as the ones which A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place II were and are being screened.
There’s something so definitively absorbing about the near total absence of noise in this film that surrounds and fills you, such that the idea of saying or doing anything feels as fearfully for you as any of the characters.
That’s some seriously persuasive filmmaking going on, buoyed by tight, close cinematography, judiciously-used music and the aforementioned silence, and it consumes and overwhelms you in the best possible way, sweeping you up into the totality of the story so completely that you might as well be in the film too, so total is your immersion.
In the midst of this subsumed state, where so much relies on the impressive facial expressiveness of all the main cast, A Quiet Place II makes us feel as if we are in mortal danger too and gets us to ponder how on earth you can possibly feel in control or safe when so much is out of your hands.
This is even more pronounced for the kids who despite their mother’s protective stance at all times find themselves, especially to the end of the film, where they have to take a measure of the brave new world around them and react accordingly.
There’s no guarantee they will be successful of course because it’s a world which is gruesomely unforgiving but the film’s great power rests in watching how they grow and develop and rise to the challenges before them.
It is a rare beast among apocalyptic horror films in that for all the loss and death, there’s a surprisingly amount of guarded hope.
Not free and unfettered of course because that is a pre-monster luxury that no one can really afford but far more expectant of living rather than dying than you might reasonably expect.
Thus, for all the nervewracking scenes that populate A Quiet Place II, and they are legion and brutally, viscerally tense, there is a quiet sense thaty perhaps fragile life can be salvaged from overwhelming death.
It’s not a gushy Disney-esque sense of hope, evincing the raw scrabble for basic survival that underpins it, but it is there, giving A Quiet Place II, which is that astonishingly rare sequel that manages to build brilliantly on the first film while telling its own unique story and growing the characters’ stories magnificently and affectingly well, all while using an economy of storytelling that is as disciplined and rewarding as the rigidly-enforced silence that is the only thing standing between Evelyn, Regan, Marcus and Emmett and total and irredeemable oblivion.