'A Quiet Place 2' trailer answers a big question from the first film

Think back to 2018: If you were left wondering what happened to Emily Blunt and her family at the end of A Quiet Place, the first teaser trailer for A Quiet Place Part II finally answers that question: They survived.

On Wednesday, Paramount released the first trailer for A Quiet Place Part II, a brief 30-second teaser hyping the full trailer that will premiere on New Year’s Day. The film will release in theaters in March 20, 2020.

In the teaser, Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and her kids (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) continue to survive the post-apocalypse, a world overrun by vicious monsters with killer hearing. The family must now dare to venture outside the relative safety of the world they’ve constructed; the film’s official synopsis teases “the creatures that hunt by sound are not the only threats that lurk beyond the sand path.”

John Krasinski, whose character Lee died in the first film, returns as director for the sequel. A Quiet Place wasn’t Krasinski’s first directorial effort — he directed episodes, and the intro, of the hit sitcom The Office, and the 2009 comedy-drama Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — but A Quiet Place was his first horror feature. The film was a smash hit, grossing $340 million worldwide and earning a 95% rating on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

But while A Quiet Place was a hit that made a sequel inevitable, it’s curious to learn whether it was its clever premise (one that guarantees tension, suspense, drama, and in the hands of a good storyteller, ingenious filmmaking) or the characters that people actually want to see. The ending of the first film was note-perfect; although you’re excited to see Blunt’s Evelyn tear monsters up like she’s playing DOOM in god mode, it’s not something you actually need to see. The ambiguity of that ending is what made it all the more compelling.

We may or may not see the ending of A Quiet Place as the opening for Part II, but we do know how it played out: The family survives, and so they must again avoid the monsters.

Cool. But it’s certainly a missed opportunity that these films aren’t taking the path of an anthology, revealing how the rest of the world (and different, diverse characters) try to remain quiet. We’ve now seen characters try to survive in rural America, but what about the streets of Cape Town, Tokyo, or Rio de Janeiro where there are sound hazards on literally every corner?

Still, because it’s Emily Blunt whose acting prowess outclasses anyone else she shares the screen with, it’s bound to be worthwhile returning to the same quiet cornfields and woods.

A Quiet Place Part II releases in theaters on March 20, 2020.