The following story contains spoilers for John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place: Part II, so don’t read the rest of this if you haven’t yet seen the sequel.
Hundreds of thousands of moviegoers shook off quarantine this past weekend and headed out to the theaters to see a new film, specifically John Krasinski’s anticipated horror sequel A Quiet Place: Part II. The Paramount release banked $57 million over the Memorial Day frame, more than doubling the amount earned by Disney’s live-action film Cruella, though that movie was also available on Disney+ Premiere for families who wanted to watch it at home. Now that people have seen A Quiet Place: Part II, I’m free to share with you the above clip of Krasinski telling CinemaBlend his favorite part of the film, which also happens to be my favorite part of the sequel.
John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place: Part II shifts its focus off of the parents in the Abbott family (mainly because John’s character, Lee, died in the end of the first movie), and onto the children. While Marcus (Noah Jupe) deals with a debilitating injury, Regan (Millicent Simmonds) embarks on a journey to find potential survivors, based on a radio signal that’s being transmitted from a nearby island.
As we learned in the first movie, Regan is deaf. It’s actually her hearing aid -- pressed up against an amplifier or microphone -- that affects the sound-sensitive alien creatures and gives humanity a chance at fighting back. And in the movie’s most effective moments, John Krasinski drops out all of the sound so that we, as audience members, can feel like Regan. It can be terrifying as we lose a crucial sense, but Krasinski told CinemaBlend that it’s a technique he actually took from the Simmonds family. He used it a little bit in the first movie, but knew he wanted to rely more heavily on it in A Quiet Place: Part II.
Krasinski told us:
I knew I always wanted to play with that. You do it a quick second in the first one, but in this one, I thought if I could pair the idea of her hearing nothing but silence in the moment that she’s the most desperate, and the most feeling alone, and the most feeling that she failed, those two things would come together in an emotional and audible way, and I hope we pulled it off. It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie!
Being that the movie is called A Quiet Place: Part II, and John Krasinski loves to manipulate sound as part of his storytelling, I’m not the least bit surprised that his favorite element of the sequel is when he removes sound altogether from the screening experience. There are moments when Regan (Millicent Simmonds) can’t hear anything, and we instantly get more nervous for her. The train car scene comes to mind.
A Quiet Place: Part II will continue its run at the theaters this weekend, but also will have to make room for a new horror sequel as The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It finds its way to multiplexes. It’s unusual, but exciting, that we now have major movies opening with consistency now. The movies are back, whether you can hear them or not!
