This article contains major spoilers for the A Quiet Place Part II ending. You can check out our spoiler-free review by clicking these words.
A Quiet Place Part II is one of the rare sequels that manages to rekindle a lot of what made its predecessor great. While it might lack that film’s sense of novelty and freshness, it inherits its precision-tooled suspense, attention to detail, and impressive performances, especially from Millicent Simmonds as Regan, who has now been promoted to the lead, and Cillian Murphy as Emmett, who largely replaces writer-director John Krasinski in the role of grizzled patriarch.
Part of the film’s appeal is that it picks up right where the first film’s rather ambiguous ending left off and works as a direct continuation of its storyline, character arcs, and themes. Well, it picks up there after a flashback prologue depicting the very first day when the spidery aliens came crashing down to Earth, 473 days – at least according the film’s own title cards – prior to when the rest of the film takes place. This opener is strikingly good from a technical standpoint but has little bearing on the narrative besides introducing family man Emmett, whom Evelyn (Emily Blunt) runs into with Regan and Marcus (Noah Jupe) after leaving the family’s flooded, ruined house with a new baby in tow following the first film’s dynamite climax.
Emmett has been living in a bunker all that time (his fires were glimpsed in A Quiet Place) following the death of his son in the prologue and the death of his wife eleven weeks ago from an unspecified illness. In his isolation – the obvious topicality of a family emerging from lockdown in our current climate is worth mentioning – Emmett has become reclusive and cynical, believing that the people left aren’t worth saving.
Of course, his attitude is challenged when Regan, believing she can track a looped radio signal back to an island, sets out alone. Evelyn, struggling with her new baby and Marcus’s stupidity, sends a reluctant Emmett to find and help her, which quickly, for him, becomes an opportunity for redemption after being unable to save his own family. An encounter with some survivors at the docks – one of whom looks like Jesus – tips Emmett and Regan, and indeed the audience, off to the fact that the extra-terrestrials can’t swim, which makes the prospect of an isolated island rather tempting. This is all cross-cut with Evelyn trying to save her baby and Marcus after the latter’s braindead impulsivity almost gets all of them killed by both alien and suffocation – if the sequence wasn’t so effectively tense I’d be a lot more annoyed at it.
Anyway, Regan and Emmett make their way to the island, where a community including Djimon Hounsou – credited, somewhat hilariously though not inaccurately as Man on Island – has been sitting pretty after being relocated by the National Guard, who also discovered that the aliens weren’t able to travel through the water. Predictable chaos ensued which only resulted in two boats making it to the destination, so the community is small and woefully ill-equipped for the arrival of one of the monsters who hitched a ride on Regan and Emmett’s boat.
In the chaos, and with help from Hounsou, Emmett and Regan flee to the radio station broadcasting “Under the Sea”, where Regan is able to broadcast the feedback from her hearing aid, which not only saves her and Emmett but also Evelyn, Marcus, and the baby, all of whom had been cornered by one of the aliens. The feedback plays through their radio and Marcus is able to perform his one useful act of the entire movie, which is to shoot the thing in the face.
That, though, is where the A Quiet Place Part II ending leaves things. Right now, we don’t know how far the feedback is being broadcast, or whether Regan and Emmett will be able to get off the island (or whether Evelyn and Marcus will be able to get out there to join them.) We’re also still lacking answers to some of the big worldbuilding questions, such as where the aliens came from in the first place and what they’re after. It must be said, though, that I don’t think knowing those things particularly matters. This highly suspenseful and effective second outing focuses on the important things and is a perfectly viable follow-up as a result.
A Quiet Place II fleshes out more of the world that was introduced in the previous film. The arrival of mysterious and malicious aliens on Earth has resulted in large swaths of humanity wiped out -- with their enhanced senses and ridiculous endurance making them nigh-unstoppable. As a result, within only a few years, life has been forced to radically change, and the surviving humans try their best to continue on while suffering the loss of their families. This shared grief sets up a major element of A Quiet Place II that, unfortunately, never really pays off as well as it could.
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The film's parental figures include Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt), one of the first film's main protagonists. Having lost one of her sons and her husband to the aliens, Evelyn dedicated herself to saving the rest of her family -- Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and her newborn infant -- from the creatures. Her journies bring her into contact with an old friend named Emmett (Cillian Murphy). Emmett lost both of his sons to the creatures and his wife to an illness. Despondent and hopeless, Emmett has survived on his own in an abandoned train depot, only leaving to bring Regan back after she ventures out on her own, and later to help her on her mission to find a still-functioning radio tower. Their journey eventually leads them to a small island community.
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Removed from the creatures thanks to the water (which the aliens cannot pass through), the island survivors have found a level of normalcy and safety in their new home. This includes an unnamed man (Djimon Hounsou) who rescued his son and brought him to the island for safety. Emmett and the Man on the Island quickly develop a light rapport, talking about how people survive, the choices they've had to make and the safety he's found with his son. In theory, this could be an emotional lynchpin of the film. So much of A Quiet Place II is about parents who've lost children, and how they try to survive in the world without them.
Contrasting Emmett (who lost everything) against the Man on the Island (who saved everything) is a good contrast and one that warranted further development. However, it could have been so much more powerful with the presence of Evelyn, who is absent from that subplot of the film. Instead, the grieving mother is relegated to a side story of trying to search through a pharmacy for supplies. If she'd been present, then perhaps the film could have delved further into the discussion about what it means to be a parent in dangerous times, the effect it's had on them and the way they see the world. But instead, after a brief conversation, Emmett ends up discovering a boat that one of the aliens used to reach the island, quickly returning the plot to a race against the creatures.
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The Man on the Island gets no further development and is killed shortly after bringing Emmett and Regan to the radio tower. It's a shame because there's a genuinely insightful sequence just waiting out of reach. If the scene had featured all three parents (or featured Evelyn more prominently in the film's core storyline), then perhaps it could have explored the characters' pathos and helped flesh them out, allowing the film to truly say something about grief. Instead, it's a bit of a missed opportunity, quickly reverting to the more standard conventions of the film around it and becoming another monster chase. It's too bad because A Quiet Place II set up a fantastic and interesting premise about survivor's guilt, but it didn't pay off nearly as well as it could have.
Written and directed by John Krasinski, A Quiet Place: Part II stars Emily Blunt, Djimon Hounsou, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds and Cillian Murphy. The film arrives in theaters May 28