A Quiet Place Monsters Don’t Make Sense

My assumption watching 2018’s A Quiet Place was that the monsters killed for food. They have unbelievably sensitive hearing, so whenever they hear what they think could be a person, they rush after it with one thought, the same thought my cat has when it hears a can open: Food.

Or so I thought.

But what we see in A Quiet Place Part II challenges that idea, because the sequel has something that the predecessor does not.

Crowds.

There are three scenes in A Quiet Place Part II that feature one or more of the nightmarish beasts not chasing one family, but instead tearing through whole crowds of innocents–there’s the opening scene set before the first film and moments after the monsters’ arrival on Earth, there’s the monsters that Emmett (Cillian Murphy) purposely attracts to save himself and Regan (Millicent Simmonds) from the bandits at the marina, and there’s the monster who attacks the island town.

In each instance we see the same thing happen–one person will make a sound that attracts a monster, and even if that monster swiftly murders a half dozen people on its way towards the person who made the initial sound, it will not stop until it gets to whatever loud jerk made that first noise.

In the marina scene in A Quiet Place Part II, we see the first monster to arrive knocking aside one bandit after another and leaving them behind to go after the noisiest.

Why? Dinner’s served, dude. Leave that guy for dessert.

The only way to get a monster’s attention off the person who made that initial sound is either to make a louder sound, or to attack it.

This is never clearer than toward the end of A Quiet Place Part II. The monster has killed at least a half dozen people in the island town, but rather than stay in the town and get its grub on, it chases Reagan, Emmett, and Henri (Djimon Hounsou) to the radio station.

If the A Quiet Place monsters kill for food, the way they act doesn’t make sense. They don’t eat when they can and they prioritize stopping “guy making sound” over eating their kills. How many meals could the monster who attacks the island town have gotten if it had let Reagan, Emmett, and Henri go on their way?

You would think this would be even more the case now that the monsters have already cut down the human population considerably. If humans are their food, then their food is a lot more scarce than it used to be.

Another possibility is that, rather than food, the monsters of the A Quiet Place films kill specifically because of the sound their victims make. Perhaps these beasts are monstrous versions of the neighbor who calls the cops if you play your music too loud. They have sensitive hearing and it could be that just about any sound is painful to them, so they immediately destroy whatever’s creating the sound.

But if that’s the case, then we have a new set of problems. After all, the monsters themselves make plenty of sound when they’re killing their prey. Wouldn’t they be sensitive to that noise?

What about when more than one monster shows up in one place at the same time, like in the marina scene in A Quiet Place Part II? If one monster is super sensitive to sound and that’s why it kills humans, well now it has to deal not only with the sounds of the screaming humans it’s killing, but the sounds of itself, and the sounds of another massive monster just like it.

We may never know why these contradictions exist with the monsters of A Quiet Place, but it’s possible future films will clarify things. One possibility? They might not be natural creatures, but something artificially created as a bio-weapon and so don’t act the way a natural predator would.

A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters next week, June 27. Maybe we’ll find more answers then.