A Quiet Place: Day One: A By-the-Book Prequel

This summer’s big monster movie franchise installment poses the question: What if you eschewed a family-driven survival story in favor of a plot with stakes no higher than that of a video game side quest? Where Cloverfield had “stay alive and save the girl you love” and Americanized kaiju films at least put a protagonist’s child or two at risk, A Quiet Place: Day One seems content to have us follow Lupita Nyong’o and her cat on a monster-ridden journey to… a pizza place in Harlem. 

But let’s back up a bit. It’s Day One in New York City, where sound levels regularly reach 90 decibels, title cards helpfully and foreshadowing-ly tell us. Sam (Nyong’o) and her cat Frodo reluctantly join her fellow hospice care patients on a field trip to a show in Manhattan, swayed by the promise of getting pizza in the city. Like the previous two movies, this one has fun with sound design, tuning into the chugging, scraping sounds the bus makes entering downtown Manhattan and the sirens and honks that make up the soundscape of New York. At the show, Sam and the audience members sit in breathless silence as a puppeteer blows air into a balloon attached to a puppet, which rises and rises to swelling music until the balloon POPS. And soon after the show, we get to the big reveal: big balls of fire falling into the city, causing explosions upon landing and unleashing blind but acutely hearing creatures that start wreaking havoc. 

Now that we’re safely ensconced in the world built by the two previous movies, it’s time to find some pizza! Sam has lived for years with the knowledge of her encroaching mortality, having passed every life expectancy date given to her by her doctors, so she’s less concerned with surviving this new threat on her life and more driven by the need to take one last journey to her favorite childhood pizza shop. We follow along as Sam and Frodo the cat make their way up to Harlem, going against the tide of survivors heading toward rescue boats stationed on the Hudson River. Along the way Frodo finds bedraggled British law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) and brings him to Sam, who is none too happy to end up with someone relying on her. 

Both Nyong’o and Quinn bring a level of complexity and vulnerability to their characters that would have faltered in lesser actors’ hands. The dialogue between the two characters is necessarily limited, aside from a subdued conversation during a thunderstorm that drowns out their voices, so any emotional resonance hinges on their ability to say more with looks than words. We don’t learn much about Eric outside of the fact that he’s far from home, but Quinn portrays his character’s anxiety, fear, and genuine affection for both Frodo and Sam even without dialogue.

Meanwhile Nyong’o, who after Us and Little Monsters seems to have been created in a lab to helm modern horror movies, balances Sam’s hardened exterior with her care for Frodo and grief about the agonizing death she’s faced for years. Whether she’s wracked with pain and withdrawals from her prescribed fentanyl patches, helping Eric calm down from an anxiety attack, or reminiscing about that pizza parlor her father used to take her to after his jazz gigs in Harlem, Nyong’o brings you front and center into whatever emotion her character is feeling. And let’s not forget Schnitzel and Nico, the cat actors behind Frodo, who make nary a peep during the journey uptown and forge a bond between Sam and Eric. The camera loves Frodo, playing up his inherent cuteness and silliness to get laughs and awws out of the audience with a regularity that feels a little one-note after a while. 

Beyond the tense or sometimes funny moments shared between our three protagonists, though, the movie struggles to maintain momentum. We’ve seen this twice before now: someone makes a noise, someone dies, repeat ad infinitum. Rather than giving us new lore about the creatures or a fun twist, A Quiet Place: Day One plays out like a by-the-book prequel. Djimon Hounsou reprises (or, pre-prises?) his role from Part II, but is sadly underutilized. And although Sam’s connection with her father does add a little more to the pizza place saga, her acceptance of her death—whether by cancer or by creature—lessens whatever tension is built up. 

There’s some real sentiment between Sam and Eric, as well as in Sam’s struggle to accept her own mortality, but it’s dealt with trivially. Spoiler alert: Sam does get pizza, in an unbearably schmaltzy scene that includes Frodo the cat stealing a slice for himself and Eric staging a silent magic show to cheer Sam up. Despite Nyong’o, Quinn, and cats lending as much emotional intensity as they can muster to their performances, the success of this pursuit lands with all the pathos of a Capital One credit card ad.

Part of what made the initial A Quiet Place film succeed was director and co-writer John Krasinski’s almost single-minded focus on one family fighting to survive unimaginable circumstances. While director and screenwriter Michael Sarnoski does a serviceable enough job with those same monster attack and escape scenes, his bland screenplay doesn’t add much to this hopefully final installment in the series.

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