Review – A Quiet Place: Day One
How do we live – and what do we live for – when our world ends?
There’s an ache to the apocalypse that movies often ignore. Film is great at capturing moments of catastrophe in all their blazing horror; Roland Emmerich has probably built four houses on that concept alone. But big-budget genre fare seems to forget that when the dust settles, what we’re really left with is shiftlessness and confusion. When the world as we know it ends, what happens next?
In the hours and days following the 9/11 attacks, before we were captured by patriotic fervor and a lust for revenge, there was a sense of national paralysis. You can see it in the videos of people walking the debris-strewn streets of New York over the following week, aimless and confused. I spent most of that day at work unable to focus; that night, I went out for coffee with a friend and we sat in silence most of the time. The world had changed – what mattered anymore? Likewise, those initial days of the coronavirus pandemic found us questioning how to go about our days when our rituals and routines were taken away.
A Quiet Place: Day One is, first and foremost, a suspense-driven monster movie, and it’s really good at that. But what elevates it above similar films is how amid the chaos and destruction it never loses sight of its human story and its curiosity about what pushes us forward when the end of our world arrives.
Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is a young woman with terminal cancer living outside New York City. When we meet her, she’s in group therapy at hospice, resentful of spending her last days alongside people three times her age. She only agrees to join them on a field trip to the city when she’s promised they can stop for pizza. While there, she finds herself at ground zero for an attack by aliens that stalk via sound. Begrudgingly teaming with scared law school student Eric (Joseph Quinn), Sam tries to stay alive long enough to make it back to her Harlem apartment.
The first two Quiet Place movies established a pretty sturdy formula. Director John Krasinski set them in a world years removed from the apocalypse and punctuated the stories with suspense-driven set pieces that required the characters to navigate in utter silence. The movies were successful in delivering the tension, and kept the audience invested by focusing on only two or three characters trapped in claustrophobic situations. The first film, in particular, works because it’s both a monster movie and an insightful family drama about the perils of parenting.
Third movies are usually where the wheels start to come off, as the formula grows rote or the desire to expand the scope robs it of its personality. Prequels are an even thornier affair, too often answering questions the audience doesn’t care about or lacking suspense because we know where everything is headed. A Quiet Place: Day One further raises the difficulty bar by switching out directors for Michael Sarnoski and putting two new characters front and center, with Krasinski and Emily Blunt nowhere to be found.
And somehow, it works. Despite everything working against it, A Quiet Place: Day One is not only a worthy entry, it’s arguably the best film in the series.
Sarnoski, who also wrote the script, avoids the prequel problems and third-entry missteps largely by sticking to the formula that has served the movies well. Yes, there’s a bigger playing field this time out – instead of the countryside, it’s New York, and rather than a world that’s already acclimating to its new reality, Day One thrusts its characters into the chaos as it unfolds. The shift from a rural setting to an urban one revitalizes the film’s visuals – I particularly love the shots of aliens scampering across the city’s high rises – and creates new dangers. Although the movie takes place in the big city, Sarnoski resists the urge to take an Aliens approach and make this a large-scale, assaultive experience. Instead, the story zooms in on specific locations with their own hazards, be it a slog through a flooded subway, generators that switch on at random, or the general cacophony of navigating a city.
The Quiet Place franchise works best when rooted in suspense, not all-out action. Day One continues that trend; there are several close-quarter encounters that have the audience holding its breath, and Sarnoski cleverly frames the aliens’ appearance in the background or over characters’ shoulders to draw out the tension and dread. Where A Quiet Place Part II grew a bit inconsistent about how much sound could attract the monsters, Day One largely ensures that its characters must always creep and whisper unless surrounded by ambient noise. It still works – the audience I saw the film in could be felt collectively tensing, and there were several moments punctuated by applause when the danger passed. My favorite moment might have been one involving Sam’s feline Frodo, who scratches at a door during a particularly intense moment, causing someone in our theater to scream “Man, f–k that cat!”
The first two films gained much from the family dynamics at their core, as well as Blunt’s fierce performance, that I was curious how Day One would survive without the original cast. Having Lupita Nyong’o at the center is a great benefit; she’s an incredibly expressive actor, which is helpful when she is given very little dialogue. Structuring the film around a character with a terminal disease is an interesting approach, and makes sense given this film’s themes. Sam is someone whose world has already begun to end, and she spends her days largely wishing things would just wrap up. When the city is under attack, all she wants is to get back to Harlem and find a slice of pizza – a bit of plotting that may sound weird, but makes sense when you consider this is someone already aware the end is coming, and she just wants to enjoy simple pleasures before it does.
Quinn, best known as metalhead Eddie on Stranger Things, is the film’s heart, a scared-out-of-his-mind college student who latches on to Sam because he doesn’t want to be alone. While Sam initially tries to shoo away her new companion, she begrudgingly allows him to come along and the two strike up an affecting friendship. Sam learns to trust people and accept companionship; Eric comes to care so much for his newfound partner that he’s willing to risk danger to get her meds to take away her pain. The movie never lingers too hard on emotional moments, but rather gives the two quiet bits of connection, kind smiles and friendly gestures that show just how much they have come to mean to each other during their journey.
Sarnoski’s Pig was one of my favorite movies of 2022, a Nicolas Cage indie that starts off in the spirit of a pulpy revenge thriller but instead becomes a meditation on loss, grief, purpose and forgiveness. Similarly, Sarnoski uses the genre trappings and formula of the Quiet Place franchise to sneak in reflection on humanity, meaning, and the things that provide notes of respite and joy. The film is full of grace notes – Sam and Eric letting a primal scream out in time with the thunder, Sam stopping to smell the pages of a book on a street corner, an impromptu silent magic show and the offer of cold pizza and whiskey – and they quietly convey the sense that although the world is collapsing, beauty and kindness still exist. Sarnoski loves capturing faces, which goes a long way in a film with limited dialogue. He focuses on Nyong’o’s eyes as Sam moves from bitterness to contentment. In one sequence, he watches a father (Djimon Hounsou, very briefly appearing as his character from A Quiet Place Part II) go to extreme measures to protect his family and then sit in the horrific reality of what he had to do. It’s rare to find a film that is so taut and lean – this clocks in at just over 90 minutes – that also takes time to let its characters be human.
A Quiet Place and its sequel’s focus on family provided a sense of immediate warmth and connection between its characters. Day One is about strangers learning to trust, cope and survive collective trauma. It’s a much rawer and sometimes bleaker film that its predecessors. But it’s also wryly funny in places, thanks largely to Nyong’o’s deadpan wit, and Sarnoski creates moments that stick. The ash-strewn streets and crowds of people silently evacuating call to mind images from post-9/11. Eric and Sam sitting together on the streets as fire billows from an open manhole is a poignant, matter-of-fact image of apocalypse. And then there are moments of quiet beauty – a marionette act early in the film, a card game as a moment of respite, a defiant stare in the final shot. It’s at the same time a red-blooded thriller and a reflective drama that works much better that I could have anticipated. Even its finale, which might strike some as abrupt, is admirable for the way focusing simply on a character’s quest to survive and avoiding the temptation to end on an effects-strewn set piece.
When A Quiet Place debuted in 2018, I initially ignored it and only caught up on a random Friday afternoon because I needed to kill some time before meeting friends. I was surprised how much I loved it. Six years later, Day One is also a surprise. Instead of a franchise-expanding cash-in, it’s a thoughtful, scary and moving exploration of survival and grief, and it cements the Quiet Place movies as some of the most interesting sci-fi/horror movies we have.