What A Quiet Place 2 Reveals About The Monsters

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for A Quiet Place 2.

A Quiet Place Part II reveals a little bit more about its extraterrestrial monsters – here’s everything new we know about the aliens. After more than a year of delays due to the pandemic, John Krasinski’s highly-anticipated sequel to 2018’s A Quiet Place finally hit theaters this weekend. While the creatures that wreaked havoc on Earth remain largely ambiguous in the first film, A Quiet Place 2 provides a little more insight into how they function and what their arrival to the planet was like.

A Quiet Place introduces blind monsters that resemble Stranger Things‘ Demogorgons. Equipped with razor-sharp claws and teeth and a head made out of flaps that houses a gigantic ear, the aliens are ultra-sensitive to sound and will go to any lengths to extinguish the noise around them. They attack any sound source but do not feed, so their diet is still unknown. Though they are by all accounts bulletproof, the first movie ends with Regan Abbott (Millicent Simmonds) managing to incapacitate one with her hearing aid’s high-frequency emissions, thereby exposing the inside of its head and allowing her mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) to kill it.

The sequel delves slightly into additional weaknesses, strengths, and origins. A scene in A Quiet Place shows a list of all the questions the Abbott family has regarding the alien’s motivations and abilities; while those questions parallel what the audience may be thinking, the film works better without divulging all that the monsters are capable of. With that being said, let’s take a look at what Krasinski does choose to reveal about these formidable extraterrestrials in A Quiet Place 2.

How The Aliens Got to Earth

In A Quiet Place, a newspaper clipping reads that a meteor struck Mexico, implying that the aliens rode in and crash-landed that way. At the very beginning of A Quiet Place 2, in a flashback to Day 1 of the alien invasion, a television in the convenience store Lee (John Krasinski) visits shows mass destruction and death happening in Shanghai. A little later, the town’s baseball game is interrupted by a massive fireball falling to Earth. As the Abbotts are heading home, sheer chaos ensues as the first attack begins.

This doesn’t quite align with what A Quiet Place says about the meteor in Mexico. Perhaps there were multiple meteors that hit the planet on that day or one broke apart upon entering the atmosphere, scattering over the globe. That would explain the breaking news report in Shanghai before the same thing occurred in the Abbotts’ hometown. In a 2018 interview, Krasinski confirmed the monsters arrived on meteorites from their home planet, which exploded. This checks out in the sequel, in which the monsters appear shortly in town after the meteorite makes landfall. Why they came to Earth remains a mystery – despite the constant noise, is the planet as hospitable as theirs was? Or were the meteors the only form of transport and they just happened to be caught in Earth’s orbit?

They Can’t Be Killed Easily

Regan and Evelyn are only able to kill one alien in A Quiet Place and another in A Quiet Place 2 because they’re able to amplify the noise coming from Regan’s hearing aid. Regan even tries to shoot one on her own but doesn’t make a direct hit. It’s only until Regan broadcasts the frequency over the radio that she and her brother are able to kill the aliens hunting them. It appears as though the aliens need to be shot and/or impaled right in the center of their heads to be killed. Because the aliens’ bodies are evolved enough to withstand any type of blast, it’s near impossible to eradicate them. They barrel through crowds and buses and trains and shop windows, hurling people aside in an effort to squelch the noise.

In a newspaper clipping in A Quiet Place, the military has been all but defeated. In A Quiet Place 2, bullets don’t work on an advancing alien. In the warehouse where Emmett (Cillian Murphy) is hiding out, Evelyn attempts to light one of the creatures pursuing her sons on fire. The alien emerges unscathed and would have detected her if it wasn’t for the sprinkler system.

Water Is Their Weakness

Water appears to hinder the aliens’ abilities, as first suggested in A Quiet Place. Lee brings his son Marcus (Noah Jupe) to a waterfall near the house. There, they can speak freely because the waterfall provides white noise that distorts the aliens’ hearing. Later, when the farmhouse basement is flooding and Evelyn is trapped with her newborn, she hides behind the falling water to mask any sounds she or the baby could make. The alien has trouble detecting her in the flood because of the rushing water. When the sprinklers turn on in A Quiet Place 2, the alien has trouble hearing anything else in its surroundings, so Evelyn can escape down the hatch to rescue the boys.

The sequel also reveals that the aliens cannot swim. After Emmett and Regan escape a rogue group of humans at the docks, they discover that aliens basically drown in water. One attempts to follow Emmett, but it seems to sink as soon as it leaps in. Another alien stays aboard an unmoored boat, which is pushed by the currents to the island off-shore, where a handful of survivors are living harmoniously. Their saving grace is that the aliens cannot swim. This parallels the aliens’ weakness in 2002’s Signs, where the extraterrestrials are physically burned by exposure to water. For all their strengths – camouflage, acrobatics, and administering poisonous gas – H2O ultimately destroys them. Again, it’s curious that both types of aliens landed on a planet that more than 70 percent covered by water.

A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place 2 has some interesting developments when it comes to the aliens, though their backstory and the films in general benefit from having little to no exposition. Now that the creatures can be impaired by high-frequency waves, courtesy of Regan’s hearing aid, and by falling water, will the heroes spread the word to other survivors? Since A Quiet Place Part II ended on a major cliffhanger, it remains to be seen whether or not this newfound knowledge will reach a national, or even global, scale in a third movie.