Pretty quickly things get simultaneously seriously bad and not as bad as they could be. Now, Evelyn alone must lead what is left of the Abbott family - teenagers Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) and the baby - into a world of perils, including not just predatory monsters, but indifferent or hostile human beings concerned only for themselves, not their neighbors or the common good. The marriage ended, as most happy marriages do sooner or later, in tragedy and bereavement, and with it ended the self-sufficient farming life they had built together. The prologue flashback - a tantalizing glimpse of the Old Normal, back when it was okay to slam car doors and holler or cheer at a baseball game - briefly reunites Emily Blunt’s Evelyn and writer-director John Krasinski’s Lee, who at that time has approximately 473 days to live.Įven on Day 1, though, events contrive to drive Evelyn and Lee apart, and they each wind up confronting the chaotic dawn of “after” in separate but parallel circumstances - a narrative device that turns out to foreshadow key developments in Part II.Ī Quiet Place was largely the story of a family - all things considered, a fairly normal, even archetypal family - and, centrally, the story of a happy marriage in unhappy circumstances.
![a quiet place review a quiet place review](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59d7e2c7e45a7c0ce235bb55/1621346232454-AEM6C7C0607XZI39UGS1/Film-Review-A-Quiet-Place-Part-II.jpg)
Technically the origin of the predatory monsters ravaging the world wasn’t addressed, but Part II takes us back to Day 1 at least long enough to establish that they fell from the sky one fine sunny day in the middle of a Little League game, although it would have been the middle of the night in Shanghai, where fragmentary news reports of unexplained fatalities were the first inkling that the globe stood on the frontier of “before” and “after.”
![a quiet place review a quiet place review](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/330c0f_d34ddc49025b400da2aca3e97419c0d9~mv2.jpg)
The original film began in medias res, on Day 89 of the alien invasion. Krasinski’s shrewd less-is-more approach to suspense and tension, and his penchant for crafting gripping set pieces and dreadful dilemmas around well-established rules, have, if anything, grown since the first film.