A Quiet Place Part II (15A, 98mins)

John Krasinski’s horror sequel was all set to be released in this jurisdiction in March 2020: the posters were on the buses and everything! Then the first lockdown struck.

Apart from a brief, fitful opening last summer, cinemas have been closed ever since, so it is perhaps fitting that A Quiet Place: Part II is the first big movie of the reopening.

Will it tempt Covid-wary punters back in? It ought to because it’s almost as good as the 2018 original, which is saying something.

In that fiendishly effective little film, Krasinski and Emily Blunt played Lee and Evelyn Abbott, a couple with three children and another on the way who’ve managed to survive a devastating alien invasion.

These extraterrestrials bear absolutely no relation to E.T. — great loping creatures with heads that open up like artichokes, they hunt by sound and, in the blink of an eye, have wiped out a fair portion of humanity.

Lee had turned the rural family home into a high-tech bunker, but the arrival of a newborn baby meant that detection was inevitable — babies cry — and he gave his life to save his family.

Cleverly, this sequel initially takes us back beyond the events of the first film to give us a flavour of the actual invasion.

In a brilliantly edited opening sequence that reminded me of the famous single-take car bombing at the start of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Lee buys some groceries in town before walking around the corner to watch his son Marcus (Noah Jupe) play in a little league game.

Marcus is just stepping up to bat when a huge explosion lights up the sky. Before you know it, the town has been overrun by yawping aliens, who use their giant claws to open car roofs like sardine tins and feast on the screaming occupants.

That was day one, and we then shoot forward in time to day 474 when Evelyn, still reeling from Lee’s death, accepts the fact that she, Marcus, her daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and baby are no longer safe in their ruined home, and must find a new hiding place.

Following a fire beacon on a distant hill, they reach an abandoned steel foundry, which they’re cautiously investigating when Marcus steps on a bear trap which rips his leg to shreds.

A man has been watching them through a telescopic lens, and now reveals himself to be Emmett (Cillian Murphy), a once jovial family friend who’s now a haunted, ravaged soul.

Having lost his wife and young sons in the carnage, he has abandoned all hope and is merely surviving for the sake of it.

He wants nothing to do with Evelyn and her brood, and demands they leave, but when Millicent becomes convinced that a radio station which constantly plays Bobby Darin’s Beyond the Sea is conveying a coded message, she sets out alone for the Long Island coast in the hope of finding sanctuary.

At Evelyn’s request, Emmett reluctantly agrees to follow her, and Krasinski then breaks his story up into three terrifying, simultaneous adventures.

He does this with great skill for the most part, constantly building tension through sound, and the lack of it.

In the first film, Regan, who’s deaf, discovered that when her hearing aid is held up to an amp or microphone, the resulting feedback is intolerable to the aliens, who reel about in agony just long enough for a well-aimed shotgun blast to dispatch them.

You’ve got to be quick though, because these divils are remorseless and insatiable.

We don’t learn much more about them in this breezy sequel and these eyeless, screeching predators are impossible to engage with: even if you were being eaten by one, you’d find it hard to take it personally.

Interestingly, though, their presence on Earth has made monsters of some survivors, scarecrows who lurch around in the shadows looking for valuables and victims.

More could have been made of this idea, and I also felt that Krasinski ends his film a little too abruptly.

Blunt, whom we last saw trotting across a bog spouting poetic nonsense in Wild Mountain Thyme, is compelling as the cornered mother who’ll do absolutely anything to keep her kids alive.

But she’s not given as much to do as she was in the first film, and more scenes between her and Murphy’s character might have been interesting.

Overall, though, A Quiet Place: Part II brilliantly teases out the first film’s premise, Murphy is very good as the dead-eyed survivor, Emmett, and Simmonds once again steals the show as the endlessly resourceful Regan.

Rating: Four stars

The Outpost (Prime Video, 123mins)

Rod Lurie’s gritty combat drama is based on a true story and, watching it, you might wonder why the US military decided to build a base in a dusty Afghan valley surrounded on all sides by high hills teeming with Taliban.

Apparently the post, near the town of Kamdesh, was intended to disrupt insurgent supply lines from nearby Pakistan, but it became a popular spot for enemy target practice, and on October 3, 2009, a 300-strong Taliban force surrounded the base and began bombarding it.

The Battle of Kamdesh is very convincingly recreated by Lurie and his actors, and the film also gives a sense of the alternating boredom and terror all frontline soldiers face.

Base commander Ben Keating (Orlando Bloom) is all about winning hearts and minds and manages what he thinks might be a lasting truce with local tribesmen. But Afghanis have seen invaders come and go, and learned the hard way not to trust them.

If the dialogue in The Outpost is sometimes stilted, the battle sequences are tremendous, and Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones are excellent. 

Rating: Three stars

Land (12A, 89mins)

At the start of Land, a woman drives her car into the wilds of Wyoming, rents a cabin high in the mountains, has the car towed and throws her smartphone in the bin.

With grim determination, Edee (Robin Wright, who also directs) is turning her back on the 21st century and all human companionship.

She wants to be alone and face her grief in private. The source of that grief will slowly become clear, but Edee’s shortcomings as an outdoorswoman are instantly evident.

When she runs out of tinned food, is attacked by a bear and almost succumbs to hypothermia, a local hunter called Miguel (Demián Bichir) comes to her aid. And as she recovers, he gives her a crash course in survival.

“Only a person who has never been hungry thinks starving is a good way to die,” he tells her sternly. But Miguel has demons of his own and realises that Edee’s will to live is wavering.

Beautifully shot, Land has a lean and spare quality akin to the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson, and has much to say about nature and human resilience.

Rating: Three stars