A QUIET PLACE PART II
Nil By Mouth
RELEASED 26 JULY
2021 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/dvd/ download
Director John Krasinki
Cast Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy,
Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
We’ve seen it before: smallscale horror is a hit. Cue chiming cash registers in everyone’s eyes, and an overblown cash-in. Thankfully, that’s not the case with John Krasinki’s multiplexhushing 2018 thriller about a family struggling to survive an invasion by monsters who hunt by sound, as Krasinski’s still at the helm (and the keyboard).
Beginning moments after the first film ended, the sequel grabs a means of fighting back and runs with it. It’s a bigger, more ambitious film – a nail-biting “day one” flashback even flips a police car – and it opens up this world, journeying to four new locations, but all this seems to flow naturally from the situation. There’s inevitably a degree of diminishing returns. A couple of plot points don’t come across clearly, and others seem rather questionable (can you really keep shutting a baby in a suitcase without killing it?). But impeccable production values and first-rate performances, especially from Millicent Simmonds as Regan, the deaf daughter now moved forward into a hero role, make this a worthy sequel, one with both high-tension setpieces and emotional realism.
Extras Underwhelming – and it’s not like they’ve been short of time. A “Director’s Diary” (10 minutes) is no such thing; instead, on-location interviews see Krasinski discussing four scenes. Of the four other featurettes (24 minutes) the most interesting is a piece on the practicalities of shooting the marina sequences. The effects and sound teams also get their moment. Don’t bother clicking on a yawnathon about Regan’s character arc. Ian Berriman
The film’s abandoned steel mill location was also used for the Shanghai battle scenes in the second Transformers movie.