Today, the trailer for John Krasinski’s highly anticipated follow-up to his 2018 smash horror hit A Quiet Place dropped on YouTube.

I was rather ambivalent two years ago when I heard that a sequel was in the works. I loved AQP (one of the best horror films of the 2010s), but I recognised that a large part of the movie’s fear factor was the mystery surrounding the world in which it takes place. The film has almost no dialogue and certainly no exposition, so we’re left to piece together what the hell happened from visual cues. And there aren’t a lot of them. The film zeroed in on the central family and focused on telling their story, not the story of their world. You only get brief glances at the blind antagonistic monsters, and you only see a full body shot in good lighting in the film’s closing minutes. These were all qualities (along with mind-blowing, Oscar-deserving sound design, an intense atmosphere that never lifts up and well-fleshed out characters) that made that movie so high quality and such a big hit from humble beginnings.

I was concerned about the sequel because it would no doubt answer the questions the original left unanswered and explore the world more, taking away some of the tension and mystery that was so tantalising to audiences in the first place. Aliens is a great movie, but were the xenomorphs ever scary again after that film went deeper into their species’ practices and turned them into machine gun fodder (let’s not talk about Prometheus, shall we?)?

I’m not saying that A Quiet Place: Part II won’t do this – it almost certainly will – but my concerns have been momentarily placated but what I judge to be a great trailer.

It seems that the film will evoke The Godfather: Part II in more ways than just the title. The trailer suggests that, like in Coppola’s film, we’ll flash back and forth between past and present, the past in this case being the first days of the monsters’ occupation of the Earth. This is a very intriguing idea – you don’t necessarily have to show the monsters’ origins, and it would be cool to see the initial panic caused by the monsters before people realised that they hunted by sound. It also gives a way – as I suspected – for John Krasinski to return as the family’s patriarch, just as Vito Corleone features in the flashbacks of Godfather II after his death in the first film (spoilers for that nearly-fifty-year-old movie). Along with Godfather vibes, I’m also sensing some inspiration taken from Children of Men, as it seems the car sequence that opens the trailer will be shot in a similarly long take to that film’s intense car scene.

In the present, we get a new concept to explore – namely, survivors outside the central family. We’ll get to see how they survive (there’s a cool bit in the trailer where Emily Blunt accidentally triggers a tripwire that causes a bunch of loud glass bottles to fall down, enticing a monster to kill whoever is trespassing on this particular survivor’s land), those who work together and those who don’t. I’m excited to see those people who exploit humanity’s situation for their own benefit.

Some people are going to have problems with how the monsters are shown in this trailer – in full daylight – but that’s not really something I agree with. Yes, I just talked about how I liked the mystery of the first film, but the closing moments showed the monsters in full. The cat’s out of the bag now – there’s no point trying to force it back in. Capitalise on the fear factor of knowing exactly where a monster is, and knowing it’s right next to you, as can be seen during one moment in the trailer.

So I’m excited for A Quiet Place: Part II‘s March release. I still have reservations about the original film’s need (or lack thereof) of a sequel, but the trailer has confirmed that there is enough filmmaking craft going into the movie from Krasinski and co. that it could actually be really good, and surprise moviegoers in the same way the first film did.