Effective ‘A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE’ Expands Franchise Through Renewed Intimacy

If you’re going to have a movie that’s basically 90% a silent film, you can’t do much better than casting the venerable Lupita Nyong’o in the starring role. The Academy Award nominee has the ability to absolutely command the screen with her physicality, combining her incredibly expressive eyes and ticcy body language, and her strengths prove a perfect fit for the very particular demands of the Quiet Place universe. The Academy has often overlooked horror performances, but awards recognition or not, Nyong’o is offering next-level genre work in the dramatically effective and true-to-its-roots prequel A Quiet Place: Day One.

As the title suggests, the third entry in the Quiet Place universe takes us back to the first day of Earth’s invasion by the sonically-sensitive Death Angels. We crash land in New York, whose cacophony of sounds, a title card informs us, is at a constant state of 90 decibels—the same volume as a human scream. It’s a fitting setting—both an aesthetic change-up from the suburban upstate environs the previous films occupied and an opportunity to see the invasion and human response at mass scale.

Director Michael Sarnoski, who made waves with his Nic Cage restaurant drama Pig, proves to be an inspired choice as writer-director. With his sophomore feature, Sarnoski leans into the human element of the story, smuggling an effectively somber drama about death and the dying within the larger demands for genre thrills. He finds a renewed sense of intimacy, rare in blockbusters, that gives real shade and depth to his characters, making them much more than your typical final girl or action hero.

Nyong’o is Sam. Sam is dying. Confined to hospice care among people twice her age, Sam is in the end stages of the same cancer that took her beloved father. A poet turned sour by the injustices of life, Sam is a cantankerous presence around the facility, spurning the friendly advances of nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff). She prefers the company of her cat, Frodo—who delivers one of the best animal performances of the decade. It’s always hard to say where praise ought to be heaped with a good animal performance, but I would level most of the praise at Sarnoski’s feet. The man clearly knows how to get the best out of his performers, man or beast.

Sam is enticed on a field trip to the inner city with the promise of a proper slice of New York pizza, only to find herself and her fellow hospice patients trapped in the midst of a full-blown alien invasion. Here, Sarnoski amplifies the chaos and destruction, unleashing scores of ultrasonic monsters upon the nation’s most populated city. There’s a certain familiarity to these moments—even though the scale is new for this particular franchise—but they are effectively staged, elevating the tension if never quite rising to being genuinely scary.

Almost freed by the apocalypse unfolding around them, Sam and Frodo (lol) embark on a quest to the Bronx for the promised pizza, making new end-of-the-world acquaintances along the way, like English law student Eric (Joseph Quinn). As a writer and director, Sarnoski stays faithful to the principles established in John Krasinski’s first entry to the franchise: this is a story about survival, but it’s also about the sacrifices we make to remain human in the most inhumane situations. From a formal standpoint, the “we have to always be quiet” conceit borders on being played out. However, the dramatic gravitas of the cast and Sarnoski’s earnestness as a filmmaker—often favoring human close-ups over computer-generated alien wreckage—makes this a sizable, and sizably effective, entry to both the Quiet Place franchise and the larger alien invasion subgenre. While a shift to NYC could have led to a thematic departure from what made these films unique, Sarnoski preserves their soul by maintaining intimacy and ensuring each spoken word counts.

CONCLUSION: Essentially an art film about a dying woman’s quest for a final slice of NYC pizza, trojan-horsed into a genre flick, A Quiet Place: Day One boasts an excellent performance by Lupita Nyong’o (Joseph Quinn is also outstanding), helping keep this franchise fresh, relevant, and true to form.