Cillian Murphy’s Emmett had already lost his entire family by the time we met him in A Quiet Place Part II, and he was holed up in a soundproofed bunker with the cheerful air of a man who’d given up on Christmas. It turns out that John Krasinski has found him a spare. Jack O’Connell has let slip that the pair play brothers in A Quiet Place Part III, which, given the house rules of this particular apocalypse, means the sibling rivalry will have to be done entirely in sign language.
O’Connell dropped the news almost in passing while talking to Collider at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Dread Central quotes him as saying: “A Quiet Place was, that felt like family. It’s about family, obviously. Got John Krasinski and Emily Blunt involved, and Cillian and I play brothers. There was a real familial feel to that one. It was cool, man.” That is an actor talking happily about a job, not a press release. Paramount hasn’t confirmed the relationship or said anything about how it fits into the story, and when the cast was first announced in March, O’Connell was listed only as a National Guardsman. So whether these are long-lost brothers, estranged brothers or brothers who simply never call each other (understandable, since a phone call could get you eaten), we don’t yet know.
What we do know is plenty. Krasinski is writing and directing again, with Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes producing. Emily Blunt returns as Evelyn Abbott, with Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe back as Regan and Marcus, and Katy O’Brian and Jason Clarke join the cast. Filming began in May, and Paramount has the film down for US cinemas on 30 July 2027, three weeks later than its original slot. Nobody seems to have heard it slip.
The casting comes with a pleasingly British (and Irish) bonus for anyone who has spent the last quarter of a century being chased through London by the Infected. Murphy was Jim, waking up alone in an empty hospital in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later back in 2002. O’Connell was the dreadful cult leader Jimmy Crystal in this year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a film that managed to include both men without ever putting them in a scene together. Hollywood has now sorted that out by simply making them related. Britain’s apocalypse produced the men; America’s has adopted them. It’s a family reunion of sorts, only very much quieter, and with fewer people sprinting.
There’s a neat bit of genre lineage in all this too. A Quiet Place belongs to the great tradition of the one-rule monster, and that tradition has a surprisingly British accent. Steven Moffat’s Weeping Angels were terrorising Doctor Who viewers with “don’t blink” in 2007, eleven years before Krasinski’s aliens started punishing anyone who knocked over a lamp. The formula is still going strong. This Halloween’s viral horror short Remain Calm, starring Doug Jones and Pauly Shore, has passed five and a half million YouTube views on the premise that the monster can only see you if you’re anxious, a set-up it openly pitches as A Quiet Place with nerves. Under those rules, most of us would be lunch before the opening titles.
The Quiet Place films have quietly (sorry) taken around $900 million worldwide across three instalments, which is a remarkable return for a franchise built on people tiptoeing about in their socks. A third film adding a long-lost Murphy brother looks like a sensible way of giving Emmett something to lose. Whether O’Connell’s character turns out to be the brother who helps or the brother who treads on the creaky stair, we’ll find out in summer 2027. Until then, here’s a small consolation for both actors: in a world where a dropped saucepan means death, nobody will have to sit through the two of them arguing over the last roast potato. Not out loud, anyway.
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