Tracking shots follow Lee and Regan into a dive bar, where the iPhone ringtone teaches them the first key to survival. An uninterrupted take follows Evelyn driving through all the panic. When the monsters begin to attack, the town descending into chaos is choreographed with nerve-wracking camerawork. When a flaming ball appears in the sky, we know what it is. Lee too joins his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) in time to cheer son Marcus (Noah Jupe) on. When we see Lee Abbott (Krasinski) park his car and slam the door, you are perturbed by the noise he's making. The film opens on the deserted main street of a small town. The mood is set with quite a sensational prologue, which takes us back to the start when a normal day turned into a nightmare. While our eyes respond to the terror of the ghastly creatures, our ears are sneakily manipulated by the sound design. The softest sound is rendered deafening as a result. Where sound is the enemy, silence serves a primordial purpose. Through it all, the viewer's focus remains unflinching with a tightly held breath. More creatures who don't care for basic etiquette like knock before entering. The what-happens-next keeps to the spirit of what-came-before. Never had the birth and cries of a baby on screen filled the viewer with such dread. The original played off the anxieties of parenting, especially keeping children safe when they seem intent on courting danger. Fix up those damn squeaking door hinges and floorboards. In a world overrun by blind alien predators with hyper-sensitive hearing, a family of survivors try to adapt to a life where making any noise means certain death. Like you're picking up from the last episode of a show you watched yesterday, when it really has been three long years. Seldom has a follow-up felt like such an organic continuation. But A Quiet Place: Part II is not a meritless cash-in. The rationale for a sequel always comes down to two things: popular demand and the almighty dollar. When the sequel to A Quiet Place was announced, there was cause for concern over repackaging what was a masterclass in suspense and sound design as merely the first instalment of a continuing saga. Rarely do we see a film dictate such self-conscious behavioural changes in the audience in a cinema hall. When the man three rows below takes a bite of his crunchy nachos, we fear he's put the characters onscreen in danger.

The fourth wall isn't broken so much as we forget it exists, shifting us from a passive to an active role. The boundary between the screen and the audience disappears in the silence. What makes A Quiet Place: Part II a worthy follow-up to John Krasinski's 2018 sleeper sensation is the same precise use and disuse of sound.

Cast of a quiet place 2