Netflix Is About to Lose The Most Inventive Sci-Fi Thriller of the Decade
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Quiet Place cinematic universe
A Quiet Place never needed a sequel.
The 2018 horror movie directed by John Krasinski is about a post-apocalyptic world overrun by vicious, bug-like aliens with an incredible sense of hearing. If someone makes even the slightest sound, the creatures come running and swiftly execute whoever made the noise.
Stories like that, with a brilliant premise that's instantly intriguing, often make for good franchises (especially since there was still plenty left to learn about the monsters). Yet Krasinski, who also co-wrote the film with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, crafted a tightly focused story on a family living in this world. And while the dad of the family (also Krasinski) dies in the movie, the story is all about how the family manages to fight back against the three alien creatures that attack their farm.
While there obviously was room for a sequel, the story told in the first one was perfectly satisfying. But A Quiet Place was so successful that they went ahead and made a sequel anyway. Thankfully, that movie is really quite good and certainly worth a watch before it leaves Netflix on Oct. 11.
Why John Krasinski made A Quiet Place Part II
Originally, Krasinski didn’t think A Quiet Place warranted a sequel. In May 2018, just two months after the surprise blockbuster success of the first movie and a few weeks after a sequel was announced by Paramount, Krasinski told Deadline “To be perfectly honest, [a sequel] was never really on my mind while we were making it. I never really thought of it as an expanded world; I always thought of it as a one-off.”
Krasinski changed his mind after realizing he could shift the focus to Regan, the deaf teenage daughter played by Millicent Simmonds. “I had this small idea, which was to make Millie the lead of the movie,” Krasinski told Variety. “Not only did I think she would give an amazing performance, which I knew she could do, her character opens the door to all the themes I was dealing with in the first movie.”
With Regan having figured out that her cochlear implant, which represents a disability, is a strength against the aliens, she naturally would be a symbol of hope in that world. That hope is played out through Cillian Murphy's Emmett, who goes from a lost soul to someone fighting for a better future.
By building on the themes from the first movie, Krasinski made a sequel that is complementary to the original. While it’s not quite as good or as shocking, A Quiet Place Part II expands the world created in the first one. It shows the initial invasion of the creatures, and reveals more about them, like their inability to swim. We also get to see how others are surviving, in the same way some of the best zombie TV shows and movies deal with people encountering other survivors. While the first movie is a tight, contained story about a family, the second one is about seeing some of that wider world through the eyes of that same family.
A Quiet Place expanded universe
The movie also made me realize just how ripe A Quiet Place’s world is for expansion. Without Krasinski leading this movie as an actor, I somewhat expected Part II to be the same thing as the first one, just not as good. Instead it manages to be its own thing, and also a worthy sequel that is certainly not more of the same.
A big part of that is because of the change in location. By taking the family off the farm and revealing an island where survivors live in safety, the movie illustrates how people in different environments dealt with the creatures. This perfectly primed me for the 2024 spin-off movie A Quiet Place: Day One, which explores the original invasion in densely-populated New York City, a place that's incredibly different — and much noisier — than the rural setting of the original. That movie was very good, as was the A Quiet Place miniseries released by IDW Comics earlier this year. While neither of these spin-off stories featured the Abbott family, they were fresh and exciting because they revealed the different ways the invasion played out.
I’m also very excited for A Quiet Place Part III, which is written and directed by Krasinski and is due out next year. Emily Blunt, who plays Evelyn Abbott in the films and, of course, is Krasinski's real-life wife, has said this will be the conclusion of a trilogy, so it very likely will be the last installment featuring the Abbott family. That said, if the movie is a success, it's entirely likely Paramount will find ways to continue making A Quiet Place content and, if they can keep any future installments at least as good as A Quiet Place Part II, I say bring it on.
A Quiet Place Part II is available on Netflix until Oct. 11.