Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for A Quiet Place Part IIIn our contemporary discourse about visual-driven genre cinema, be it action, sci-fi, or horror, a surefire way to denote quality is to mention its usage of long takes. Fluidity, comprehension, and the subconscious assurance that what we're seeing play out is "actually happening" — these are the signifiers of a well-crafted film. Conversely, you start chopping your genre film up enough, you get ridiculed and memed.

A Quiet Place Part II, a film full of action, sci-fi, and horror is founded on these types of long takes. And they are confidently beautiful in their dissemination, playing so subtly even as what they're capturing is full of terrifying bravado; the prologue sequence is one for the ages, be it Emily Blunt's backwards car driving or John Krasinski walking by the same dog under wildly different contexts twice in a row. But A Quiet Place 2 isn't solely a showpiece for director Krasinski and DP Polly Morgan to flex, to bust out the longest shots possible, to give their editor Michael P. Shawver a series of oners to plop into Avid and export. In fact, the sequel's most tension-stoking, rawly terrifying moments come not in sequences of filmmaking fluidity, but in sequences that love rapid editing, fence-jumping cynicism be damned.

RELATED: Watch John Krasinski Break Down 'A Quiet Place Part II's Opening Scene

Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place Part II
Image via Paramount Pictures

If you're unfamiliar with a "match cut," think 2001: A Space Odyssey's sudden edit from a prehistoric bone to a satellite in space. In emphasizing the visual similarity of these two literally disparate subjects, the film draws a conclusive relationship between them, arguing directly that one leads to the other and both exist together. And if you're unfamiliar with "cross-cutting," think The Silence of the Lambs' editing between Buffalo Bill in his home, an FBI unit raiding "a home," and the eventual realization that Clarice Starling was in front of Bill's home this entire time. In cutting between these different scenes, the film suggests, on a basic level, that they're happening at the same time, while emotionally juicing the feelings of suspense, narrative stakes, and dramatic irony (in that none of the subjects know the other scenes are happening, but we do). Its "surprise ending" is a perfect payoff of the cross-cutting technique; it shows us how that technique played us like a fiddle while being the maestro the whole time.

I walked away from A Quiet Place Part II in awe of the sequences that used these two fundamental editing techniques — the match cut and the cross-cut — to wring me out like a damn dish towel. Not only do these techniques serve as lovely foils to the film's prestigious cinematographic vocabulary of long takes, but they give the film a raw jolt, a purposefully "loud" source of horror, and an assurance that we'll never be as safe as we think we are. With a long take, what you see is what you get; with cross-cutting between similar-yet-different images, you never know what's going to happen in the next frame.

Millicent Simmonds and Cillian Murphy in A Quiet Place Part II
Image via Paramount Pictures

If the first Quiet Place was a study on the strength of the family unit even as it's "broken" in fundamental ways, A Quiet Place 2 is a study on the strength of the individual even as their family unit remains "together" in fundamental ways. It's a coming-of-age story, in other words; a film that gives Blunt and Cillian Murphy some lovely arcs, sure, but primarily focuses on the depth of maturity Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe must undergo not just to stay alive, but even to save the world. As such, the film tends to split up our main characters, whom we saw together so often in the first film, giving everyone an almost TV-feeling A, B, and C story, ensuring they're able to grow as the individuals they need to, to give the film's screenplay (by Krasinski) its thematic punch.

Out of all these split-up sequences, the three-tiered midpoint shook me the most. Simmonds and Murphy are at the marina trying to find a boat. Blunt has traveled to a local pharmacy to get medical supplies. And Jupe is holding down the fort, watching his baby brother while exploring their new hideout. Then, jeopardy strikes all three stories: a feral cabal of sickos led by Scoot McNairy capture Simmonds and Murphy, Blunt realizes a creature is about to strike their hideout, and Jupe finds the corpse of Murphy's wife right before accidentally locking himself and his baby brother in the safe, their oxygen running out. The rare and effective Triple Woof!

Krasinski and Shawver don't make ostentatious meals out of these scenes' cross-cutting. The throat-gripping suspense, ever-rising in intensity, is evident from the usage of cross-cutting itself, so there's no need to add any "look at what we're doing" stylistic bravado atop (an odd case of this film being "subtle," given the cannibal crew and the CGI creature and the baby in peril and the wild Marco Beltrami score and etc., etc.). Cross-cutting here represents a danger in our characters' splitting up, an editorial extension of Blunt's tearful insistence that they would've been stronger together. As we cut from individual to individual, all in a special blend of peril and terror, it's hard not to see her point.

A Quiet Place Part II ultimately wants these characters to succeed as individuals bolstered by an inherent "togetherness" that needs not be spoken of too loudly. Thus, the match cut comes into play. Remember in The Last Jedi when Rey and Kylo Ren's Force communications were rendered in simple shot-reverse-shots that seemed to imply they were in the same physical space, when in fact they were not? A Quiet Place 2 uses these kinds of symmetry in its match cuts to a similar effect, using our preexisting knowledge of what filmmaking spatial orientation implies to cut from a character in one space to a separate character in a separate space as if they are interacting with each other. It also match cuts in between separate kinetic motions, with one character's movement in one location seeming to "finish" by virtue of cutting to another character's movement in another location. These pieces of editorial togetherness, of keeping these characters emotionally tethered despite their physical distance, culminates in the sequence's resolution of physical togetherness; Murphy calls back the prologue by telling Simmonds to dive, and Blunt and Jupe save the baby from the invading monster. Match cuts are the foreshadowing, the gateway drug to the conclusion not just in this sequence, but in the film in its entirety.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Long takes are impressive. I get it, I praise them often myself. But A Quiet Place Part II reminds us of the power of filmmaking techniques at their most simple. It reminds us that the simplest action, whether it's cutting between two subjects that sort of look alike or playing a high frequency over a radio station, can have the most complex effect.

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