A little while ago I had drinks with a buddy who was back over from Spain. He needs to sort out a visa issue and covid has meant that he is here for longer than he thought. At his drinks, there were many people that I didn’t know. One of them was a lovely young lady, he said she was one of his best female friends, and then paused and thought about what he said, and rephrased it and said, no, she is one of my best friends.
A Quiet Place Part II (dir. John Krasinski) quickly jumps into before the original film, setting up the scene of what happened before Part 1. Then we leap forward to directly after the first film. Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) has just figured out along with her daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) how to kill the alien invaders that have destroyed civilization as we know it.
The premise of the first film and this one is that these alien creatures are drawn to sound and kill anything that makes noise. This is an interesting cinematic device because it means that movement is the enemy, and film is meant to be a show, don’t tell, medium. Since they have to move around to accomplish anything, everything that gets the characters closer to their goal could also lead to calamity.
In the first film, Kransinki and Blunt were the main characters but this film squarely sits on the shoulders of the impressive Simmonds. She is the driving force behind the movie. The first film was very intimate and explored the family dynamic of loss and grief, wherein Part II expands upon the world that was created, looking into how society would act and respond.
The family leave their damaged family home and seek shelter and support from people around them. People they haven’t seen for over a year. They met up with Emmett (Cillian Murphy) who tells them that the people in the world now are not good people. They have changed, the world isn’t a nice place.
Simmonds figures out there is a way to use their technique to defeat the creatures on a large scale and heads off into the wilderness to save her family. She is not the strongest or fastest, she is also deaf, but she places the responsibility of what she can do over the possibility of what she will lose. Sounds like a hero to me.
Her brother, Marcus (Noah Jupe) on the other hand is terrible. Everything he did annoyed me. I wanted the aliens to get him. The choices his character was making were infuriating. He might be the best actor in the film because I hated him so very very much.
Part II doesn’t have the uniqueness of the original but it still has plenty of uncomfortable scenes and tension, and, from watching the people around me at the IMAX, lots of scares. People were holding their heart: it’s a good sign they were scared.
When I was watching the film I was thinking that Simmonds was the best female badass I had seen on the screen for a long time. I thought Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road was probably the last female badass I had seen, then I thought to myself. No, Simmonds is one of the best badass I have seen in a while, no caveat required.
28 May 2021
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe