‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Review: Lupita Nyong’o Dodges Aliens with Her Cat While Looking for Pizza in Competent Yet Unremarkable Prequel

The A Quiet Place franchise is the poster child for enjoyably competent yet unremarkable studio horror. With the first two films spearheaded by John Krasinski, who served double duty in front of and behind the camera, it was the perfect example of a series pulling from its blockbuster thriller influences while recognizing its limitations so as to not punch above its weight. For the first two films in what is now a full-blown franchise, this has been for better and worse. Each has refused to promise more than it can offer in their simple, high-pressure situational horror while, by that same token, never amounting to much more than a film aping the larger, more successful aspirations of its forebears without excelling in the same arena of heady ideas or true filmmaking virtuosity. This is a simple and broad, but often effective, audience-friendly horror franchise—point blank.

But before Kransinski was running around the rural outskirts of post-apocalyptic America with Emily Blunt trying to keep their kids safe from the aurally attuned alien invaders by living on an isolated farm and writing “What is the WEAKNESS” on whiteboards, Lupita Nyong’o was running around New York City with her cat Frodo trying to find the last great slice of pizza in the city while avoiding being dramatically and bloodlessly ripped away off-screen by Earth’s assailants like so many of the poor extras. That may sound like some kind of weird Mad Libs suggestion of what could fuel the plot for the A Quiet Place prequel but I assure you, this is the dramatic thrust of A Quiet Place: Day One. 

But that’s, of course, uncharitable. The curious reasons why Nyong’o’s character Sam is willing to brave the ever-present dangers lurking in the now-abandoned streets of New York is tied up in obscured character motivation carefully doled out by Pig director Michael Sarnoski. Having made a cult name for himself with his strange and touching Nicolas Cage drama, he brings that intimate sensibility to his big-budget studio picture debut, which is more interested in sketching out the emotional plight of his lead characters than lingering for too long on the precarious situations they find themselves in. 

Sam’s journey starts just hours before the invasion, as she and a group from the hospice center where she resides for an ambiguous muscular disability head out on a field trip to a marionette show in the city led by nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff). As her emotional support animal, Frodo goes wherever Sam goes, which is unfortunate for him when following the show the streets of New York suddenly become ground zero for Earth’s takeover by the brisk, spindly alien creatures of this universe. The city’s residents seem to have a preternaturally swift understanding that staying alive means staying quiet, and soon enough Sam separates herself from the group of survivors holed up in the theater to embark on her own journey. Eventually, she reluctantly accepts the company of Eric (Joseph Quinn), a man terrified of going forward in this new world alone. From there, it’s a series of set pieces interspersed with quiet character development, as Sam, Eric, and Frodo try to avoid the keen-eared interlopers. 

If nothing else, the A Quiet Place films are a novel prospect because of how they force themselves to craft broadly targeting thrillers on the basis of extremely minimal dialogue. The characters being unable to speak is something intrinsically baked into the premise. This is sidestepped in the first two films largely with the use of sign language, but Day One resolves to let the audience linger in often completely wordless fear along with the characters. They find moments when they can communicate quietly, but Sarnoski’s script mostly depends on silent character development between Sam and Eric, the duo’s bond reliant on sly looks and glances from Nyong’o and Quinn. The two develop a believable rapport with one another, even if the emotional depth of their relationship never reaches an emotional level past what’s needed to play up the dramatic tension of the script. Most of the dramatic tension is instead leveraged from the fate of Frodo at any given moment, the best movie cat we’ve seen in some time. Cat people, now is our time.

To that same end, Sarnoski is never able to fully explore the depth of Nyong’o’s internal turmoil in a completely satisfying way. This is a character that is going deeper into the city while everyone else is making their way to the shore to escape on evacuation boats, and yet the connection to her past that is drawing her further and further into the heart of danger always feels tenuous at best. There’s a push and pull happening within the core of the film: it always feels like Sarnoski is more interested in making a quiet character drama, but he keeps getting pulled away by the obligatory alien attack set pieces that Sam and Eric have to survive. 

This hurts the sequences of tension and action, as well. While Sarnoski proves himself a capable hand at directing sequences of anxiety and draws out a decent amount of pressure where it counts—a scene of our characters outrunning one of the creatures in a flooded subway tunnel comes to mind—none of them stick in the memory as particularly remarkable compared to what we’ve already seen from this franchise. Perhaps this speaks to a fundamental problem of attempting to mine more material from this conceit: though it’s admirable to make films where a majority of the auditory experience is pure sound design that draws out the stress of attempting to remain quiet, there’s only so many things you can do to break that tension. Oh no, this character stepped on something loud; oh no, this character knocked something over. With Day One, it begins to feel like a familiar rinse and repeat rather than a successful formula. 

That said, as far as mainstream horror-thrillers go, there are worse alternatives than what something like Day One has to offer. In building off the influences like Spielberg and Shyamalan established in the other two entries, Day One has a respectable sense of blockbuster scale despite culling the story down to the desperate relationship of two survivors, and moves with a propulsive pace that keeps the energy alive. Sure, it may feel like an also-ran edition of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, but it’s made with a steady sense of mood by Sarnoski, and cinematographer Patrick Scola (who also shot Pig and this year’s Sing Sing) frames events with a handsome, gritty realism. Moreover, there’s a necessary space in the cinema-going ecosystem for movies like Day One—mid-budget ventures that appeal to audiences and help to develop the craft of burgeoning filmmakers as they continue to cut their teeth while growing in their careers. A Quiet Place: Day One won’t go down as Sarnoski’s finest hour, but it’s the kind of stepping stone that leads a director to the film that will be.

Grade: C+

Paramount Pictures will release A Quiet Place: Day One only in theaters on June 28.

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Trace Sauveur

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