A Quiet Place: Day One admirably tells a brand new story in a world where aliens with incredibly sensitive hearing have invaded and killed anything that makes a sound. It follows two new characters with a simple, relatable goal, each of whom finds a small slice of humanity in an unfathomable, inevitable situation. Along the way, it also provides a few decent thrills and emotional moments.
What the film doesn’t do, however, is justify its existence by forwarding anything we’d already learned in the previous two films, nor does it have a strong sense of terror or dread simply because the characters never quite break out of their shells. As a result, A Quiet Place: Day One is a well-intentioned film that largely disappoints.
To really dive into that though, first I feel compelled to revisit why this movie exists in the first place. In 2018 and then again in 2020, director John Krasinski made hit horror films that followed a family struggling to survive in this world of forced silence. The scares came most from the fact we cared deeply for this family and were drawn in by their relatable, undeniable love for one another. Along the way, the family even finds some hope by discovering a way to combat the killer aliens, leaving us with a cliffhanger of how humans may one day fight back.
Obviously though, Day One takes place before all that. Set over the first few days of the alien invasion, it follows Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a poet who has cancer and knows she’s going to die. As such, she lives at a suburban hospice facility and when she and some of her fellow patients take a trip to New York City to see a show, the aliens shoot in from space and all hell breaks loose.
The idea of seeing the first moments of this invasion is instantly intriguing. That is, until you remember we saw exactly that already in A Quiet Place Part II. That was from a different perspective and location, of course, but having an instant emotional connection to the characters raised the stakes. Here, when it happens, we’ve just met Sam and don’t really know a lot about her besides that she’s desolate. We do know she has a cat named Frodo though, who she carries around and is on a leash. Frodo steals the movie and every time he wasn’t on screen I kept thinking, “When is Frodo coming back?” (Also, a side note, a person named Sam having a cat named Frodo is perfect.)
Director Michael Sarnoski (who also wrote the film) stages the invasion over multiple sections of the movie. There’s first contact, subsequent waves, and all manner of various reactions as the aliens deal with different sounds. One in particular, showing how a huge army of them stampedes through the streets toward a particularly loud noise, is very cool, even though it happens several times. For the most part though, because we did see humans picked off one by one at the beginning of the last film, this largely feels like more of the same, just with a few embellishments and new locations.
Sam is knocked unconscious near the beginning of the madness and when she awakens, everyone around her has figured out the key to survival: keep quiet. That means, unfortunately, we don’t see how or who figured this out. It just happens and a golden opportunity to advance the mythology is glossed over. Realizing this is an impossible situation, especially in her condition, Sam decides she wants one thing: a slice of pizza from a specific place in Harlem. So she sets off on her own and as everyone else attempts to escape the city, she goes the other way. She has accepted her fate and is going to make one last decision for herself, no matter the cost.
Along the way, which is filled with several instances of random people making noises and the aliens killing them, she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn). Like Sam, Eric is a lone stranger, lost in the world with nothing for him. We learn his parents live in another part of the world and he’s in law school, but that’s about it. He does like Frodo, though, so he decides to follow Sam, even as she begs him not to. Eventually, he decides he likes her idea of getting that last slice of pizza and makes it his goal as well.
The friendship between the characters develops slowly, mostly through non-verbal actions and, on one occasion, a poetry reading made possible because it’s raining to mask the sound. And yet, as earnest as both Nyong’o and Quinn are in their performances, they’re still largely strangers to the audience and themselves. So, as they move closer to the pizza place, facing more obstacles and action set pieces, there’s some excitement there but also an emotional disconnect. Each only has each other and yet it’s still new. The friendship simply doesn’t match the dynamic set in the previous films of parents protecting children or kids protecting their siblings.
Worst of all, as the characters navigate the world, very little happens. We know they want to get pizza, and each scene teaches us a tiny bit more about each of them, but the threat is always exactly the same as in the previous two movies, just less exciting and more repetitive. They walk, make a noise, run to take cover, then leave again, over and over. We never get any real sense of the progress they are making uptown. It’s just one location followed by another, followed by another until, magically, they get there.
The most impressive part of A Quiet Place: Day One, and this is both a positive and a negative, is the sound design. Sarnoski and his team created an excellent sonic experience with the film, with bass lines that shook my chair, and quiet whispers amongst the silence to enhance the terror. And while it’s fantastic how great the sound is, that it’s the sound I found most noteworthy from a technical standpoint is probably not ideal. Everything about the movie works but nothing rises above to elevate the experience, except the sound.
Plus, it’s also important to remember that while A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel, it’s also the third movie in a franchise. By this point, one would expect some sort of escalation or advancement to the audience’s knowledge of the world. Some new wrinkles about the characters. New revelations to be excited about in the future. Unfortunately, there’s almost none of that. One scene seems to tease it—when Eric discovers an alien nest—but that’s quickly forgotten. Djimon Hounsou, who appeared in the second film, also shows up, but only briefly.
By the end of A Quiet Place: Day One my primary emotion was frustration followed closely by boredom. Neither the characters nor their relationship hooked me. There are some fairly strong attempts to the contrary, especially in the third act, but I found those more amusing than moving. The finale is also underwhelming even though it pays off everything that’s come before it. I left the film wondering why this movie exists in the first place. After it ends, what do we know about this world that we didn’t know before? That two strangers can bond over this incredible trauma? Okay, but what of it? That there’s hope to be found in horrible situations? Fine, but we knew that too. How does any of it advance anything? The answer is that it doesn’t.
Finally, as I wrote this review, I noticed that the initial Rotten Tomatoes score for the movie is pretty high. I’m firmly in the minority here, which I’m happy about. I’m always optimistic about movies and am ecstatic that other people connect to or enjoy things even when I don’t. I truly wish I could join them. The fact is, though, I think both the first and second A Quiet Place movies are excellent films. Scary, exciting, heartbreaking, and more. A Quiet Place: Day One, however, is none of those things. It tries to be, time and time again, but in the end, it just falls on deaf ears. The cat rules though.
A Quiet Place: Day One is now in theaters.
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