- UK release: June 2021
- Director: John Krasinski · Writer: John Krasinski
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Platinum Dunes; Sunday Night Productions
- Genre: Post-apocalyptic creature thriller / survival · Runtime: 97 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Emily Blunt (Edge of Tomorrow, Sicario) as Evelyn Abbott; Millicent Simmonds (Wonderstruck, A Quiet Place) as Regan Abbott; Noah Jupe (Ford v Ferrari, Honey Boy) as Marcus Abbott; Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Inception) as Emmett
- Rotten Tomatoes: 91% critics / 92% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The first A Quiet Place was that rare thing, a horror-adjacent thriller built on a single brilliant constraint: make a noise and the monsters find you. It worked because John Krasinski, a man best known until then for comedy, treated silence as a discipline rather than a gimmick, and trusted his audience to lean in. The problem every sequel of this kind faces is that the constraint is no longer a surprise. We know the rules now. So the interesting question with Part II is not whether Krasinski can scare you again, but whether he can find somewhere new to take a world that worked precisely because it was small and shut in.
The setup
Krasinski opens with a flashback to the day everything arrived, a daylight set-piece in an ordinary American town that shows us, for the first time, the moment the silence began. Then he picks the story up where the first film left it. The Abbotts, mother Evelyn and her children, are forced off the ruin of their farm and out into a world they have only ever glimpsed from behind closed doors. They are carrying a newborn, an injury or two, and the one piece of knowledge that might matter. What they find is that the creatures are not the only danger left, and that other survivors have had their own years to decide what kind of people the end of the world has made them. I will leave the rest where the film leaves it.
The cast
Emily Blunt remains the anchor, though the film quietly shifts its weight off her. Where the first film was a story about parents, this one belongs to the children, and Millicent Simmonds carries it. As Regan, the deaf teenager whose hearing aid turned out to be the family’s one advantage, she has the most active role in the film and the most to play: resourceful, stubborn, frightened and unwilling to show it. Simmonds is deaf herself, and the performance has a directness that never tips into the saintly. Noah Jupe gives Marcus the raw, flinching terror of a boy who knows he is not the brave one. The newcomer is Cillian Murphy as Emmett, a survivor who has retreated into himself, and Murphy is very good at the particular emptiness of a man who has decided that caring about anyone else is a luxury he can no longer afford. The slow thaw of that is one of the film’s better threads.
The craft
The craft is where the first film earned its reputation, and Krasinski has not let it slip. Polly Morgan’s cinematography is colder and more mobile than the original, suiting a story that has left the farmhouse behind for the open road. The sound design is again the real engine: the film keeps cutting to Regan’s point of hearing, dropping the world to a muffled hum, so that a scene you can hear and a scene she cannot become two different kinds of dread running at once. Krasinski has learned to cross-cut, and there is a long stretch late on where three separate threats unfold in parallel, each one able to kill at the smallest sound, that is as tightly wound as anything in the genre this year. At 97 minutes it does not outstay its welcome. If anything it is in a hurry, which is the right instinct for a film about people who cannot afford to stop moving.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the first film, and Part II is the leaner, more conventional of the two: a chase and a journey rather than a chamber piece, with the novelty of the premise spent. Reach a little wider and it sits comfortably alongside the better creature-survival pictures. The opening invasion owes something to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, all panic and half-seen catastrophe at street level, and the texture of scavenged, watchful survival recalls the early stretches of 28 Days Later, which is no accident with Murphy in the cast. It does not have the formal nerve of the original, but it is a more generous film, willing to spend time on the question of whether the survivors owe each other anything.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics and audiences are, for once, in cheerful agreement: 91% from the critics, 92% from the public, and the line running through both is that this is a sequel that delivers exactly what was promised without coasting. That matches my own reaction. The praise is for the set-pieces and the sound, the mild reservation is that a second visit cannot land the conceptual punch of the first. Both are fair. Nobody is calling it a disappointment, and after a year in which the question of whether anyone would go back to a cinema at all was genuinely open, a tense, well-built crowd-pleaser is a welcome thing to have on the biggest screen you can find.
Verdict
This is a sequel that understands its own appeal and does not try to outsmart it. The premise is no longer a revelation, and the story is a straighter line than the first film’s, but the suspense is real, the craft is excellent, and the young cast give it a beating heart that a lesser franchise entry would have skipped. I value tension built on rules rather than jump scares, world-building that adds rather than explains, and a film that knows when to stop, and this clears all three. It is not quite the small miracle the first one was, but it is a confident, gripping ninety-seven minutes, and the kind of film I would happily sit through again with the sound up. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, and well worth seeing in a full auditorium where the silences carry. A premium streaming release on Paramount platforms is expected to follow later in the year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the silent world kept growing. A third film, A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), turned away from the Abbotts to dramatise the invasion itself in New York with Lupita Nyong’o, the daylight catastrophe this film only previewed in its opening minutes. Part II has settled in as the dependable middle chapter of the series, less talked about than the original but rarely called a letdown. It now streams on Paramount+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for sustained threat, bloody images. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: There are scenes of sustained threat in which giant creatures chase after and attack adults and children.
Injury detail: There are bloody images when creatures are shot in their heads, with resultant gory injury, blood spurts and subsequent sight of the creatures lying in pools of blood.
Additional issues: There is infrequent strong language (‘f**k’), as well as milder terms, including ‘shit’, ‘God’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘damn’.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
