Killing for a Quiet Life

John Krasinski ’s dystopian films, A Quiet Place , Part II ( 2020 ), remain a maddening mystery.

In these first two films, giant, human-gobbling praying mantises fall to earth and begin annihilating humankind.

They cannot see, so they navigate and hunt by sound, their acute hearing provoking them to attack even the faintest sound.

For the next 99 minutes , we follow childless cat-lady Samira ( Lupita Nyong’o ), a terminally ill cancer patient, and her feline Frodo , who are soon joined by British law student.

It’s easy to root for the woman-man-cat trio, and fans who have seen the other two films know the invaders’ strengths and weaknesses by now.

In A Quiet Place:Day One, the punishment for the mega-clatter of modernity is a showdown between the world we knew before the population explosion and today ’s skull-rattling and soul-killing noisescapes where 57 percent of humans are rat-packed into urban dependency.

Something about the amount of noise we generate and the ensuing failure to ignore it is going to get us.