A Quiet Place Part II

John Krasinski’s well-received break-out hit A Quiet Place drew attention on this blog last year for its relative absence of music; the trailer for its follow-up, the aptly-appended Part II, continues this approach.

After a six-second micro teaser, we’re greeted with the sound of a tuning radio—notably, before its image; a “day one” title card is placed first with the sound acting as an audio bridge. This effect of blacking out the screen and letting the audio bleed over is used at the 0:32 mark, effectively disorienting the audience as much as the protagonist (Emily Blunt, as the head of the Abbott family) has been blindsided by the alien. This happens again at 0:33, and for a brief moment there’s silence as well—this complete disconnect between image and sound for these two moments serve as an effective jump scare.

Notice that forty seconds into the trailer, there’s no music or anything resembling it as of yet—much in keeping with the original film’s trailer. Instead, we’re left to sit with the purely diegetic sounds and moments of silence. As mentioned regarding the original’s trailer, this is a break from most trailers which seem to seek to fill almost every moment with sound and music, if for no other reason than to allow the trailer to narratively congeal. However, the silence in A Quiet Place Part II very much asks the audience instead to face the discomfort of silence. That nothingness can itself be rather disturbing in a world where we are not only able but encouraged to fill every waking moment of life with some distraction, entertaining or not.

At 0:48 we get our first non-diegetic sound effect as Blunt’s character is forced to quickly reverse her car; this one lasts a moment, but it’s brutally intense, bolstered by piercing strings in the last couple of seconds. This is followed by an even longer moment of pitch black screen and silence, and then the studio title card.

For the second half we do get some offscreen tones as we see the family in survival mode. This again seems to be associated with relative safety as that musical veil is pierced when Blunt’s characters trips a wire causing some bottles to make noise (in the franchise, aliens hunt by sound). When we see the family running in the next scene there’s notably no longer any non-diegetic music or sound once again, more in line with the first half of the trailer. A small sound effect does enter at 1:42 and 1:52, but these exceptions do more to prove the rule.

At 2:05 onward, however, as we enter a montage sequence, we hear more music than ever, with something resembling a Shepard tone with its ceaselessly rising musical line in the strings and synthesizers. At 2:22 this is cut off and a line of dialogue is heard in stark contrast against a once-again pitch black screen (“the people that are left...”) —this dialogue acts as an audio bridge, much in the same way as the trailer’s opening, and it’s completed as a metacommentary on the gun on screen (“... are not the kind of people worth saving”). The sound of the shotgun loading is in essence how the trailer ends; it’s an exercise in subtlety, and how less can mean more—as it often is in horror.

A Quiet Place Part II arrives in theatres March 20th.

— Curtis Perry