It’s one of the most tense scenes in recent cinema. Regan, the teenage hero of A Quiet Place Part II, is alone and scavenging for supplies in an abandoned train station. She climbs into a rusted carriage and works her way cautiously to the front. The camera faces her so we peer down its length – and watch, chilled, as a monster, a ghastly tangle of claws, teeth and scuttling limbs, creeps in behind her. 

The monster is blind. But Regan is deaf. So the audience is rooted as this mute game of cat and mouse plays out; the atmosphere chloroforms with dread. But it’s no spoiler to say Regan comes off better than her toothy tango partner. 

“It wasn’t just about portraying a deaf person authentically,” Millicent Simmonds, who plays Regan, tells me over Zoom via her interpreter. “But also what would make sense for a deaf person to do in that context? And how would they communicate without an interpreter, because that’s what’s happening on screen.” 

Like her character, Simmonds is deaf, with some hearing via a cochlear implant. That implant becomes crucial to the action of A Quiet Place, and its sequel, as the survivors discover their alien invaders are acutely sensitive to sound – the white-noise feedback from Regan’s implant is about the only thing which stops them in their tracks. 

Simmonds explains: “When I first read the script [for A Quiet Place], and I saw how the character goes from feeling vulnerable and her burden to her family, and transforms by the end of the movie, I thought that was incredibly powerful. But I didn’t have any notion of how powerful it was going to be, not just for me but for the deaf community and the disabled community at large. I don’t think we’ve seen a disabled character like this before in a film.”