If you were dying, how would you handle an apocalypse? What would motivate you? How would you react to a surprise global catastrophe unfolding around you? Those are the initial questions asked by Michael Sarnoski’s “A Quiet Place: Day One,” an unexpectedly moving prequel to John Krasinski’s pair of genre-twisting thrillers that began with 2018’s “A Quiet Place.” And before you yell “Spoiler!” we’re sad to say the first scene in the movie takes place in a hospice where we meet our unconventional heroine, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o). A one-time poet near the end of a long battle with cancer.
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Justifiably moody, Sam has only her service cat Frodo (perhaps the quietest and fearless cat you’ve ever met), and a notebook to keep her going. After she crosses the line at a group meeting, a facility nurse, Rueben (Alex Wolff), convinces her to tag along with her fellow patients for a show in the city. Sam thought she’d already experienced her “last” trip into Manhattan, but agrees to go if she can get a slice of New York City pizza while they are there. Rueben reticently agrees.
Disappointingly, the stage show in question turns out to be a puppet show and while Sam is initially annoyed at the prospect, she’s quickly transfixed, just like the children in the audience, by the puppet master’s manipulation of his doll. It’s a captivating moment that is one of the first signs that Sarnoski is forging a different aesthetic in comparison to the first two films. Something of a relief, frankly, if you were a fan of his acclaimed 2021 thriller “Pig.”
Taking a break from the show, Sam steps outside the theater just as the aliens descend in a wave of asteroids crashing into the city. An invasion that transforms into a genuinely gut-wrenching sequence. That’s no easy feat considering the inherent familiarity of the “Quiet Place” world and a deluge of disaster movies and television series (“Station Eleven” comes to mind) that have saturated popular culture over the past three decades already. And while the British filmmaker has publicly said both he and ace cinematographer Pat Scola found inspiration in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men,” it’s impossible to not feel the echo of the events of September 11th, which spurred Cuaron to make his film, throughout that moment and the entire proceedings. There have been many disaster films set in New York since that day, but how Sarnoski captures the palpable horror as Sam and everyday people react to these monsters makes “Day One” stand apart.
And, yes, the rules of engagement from the previous films are still the same. Don’t make a peep or these aliens will use their heightened hearing to find you and kill you before you have a chance to even consider fighting back. Oh, and they still hate water (whew). When Sam wakes up after getting knocked out by a shock blast, Henri (Djimon Hounsou) quickly teaches her how silence is the only weapon they have at their disposal. As she scours the room of initial survivors she witnesses a large group of people scared out of their minds, many of them biting on rags and attempting not to cry as they deal with major injuries and wounds. They have no idea how long they will hide or who will save them. The terror is real.
When the authorities use the noise of fighter jets to lure the aliens away from a secure area, the invaders rampage across the island like the most dangerous bull stampede you could imagine. This is when Sam decides to forge a different path than those heading to the boats. It sounds silly, but she came to the city for one last slice of pizza. If this is the end of the world, she’s going to make the trek from lower Manhattan to Harlem in hopes that one last pie is still sitting on an empty counter of her favorite pizza place. Before she knows it, she, well, Frodo, meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), a British law student who, like many of the people she encounters, is in shock or PTSD (perhaps both) over what they have experienced. She tries to ditch him several times, encouraging him to head to where safety beckons, but he keeps coming back. He simply does not want to die alone.
As the pair make their perilous journey uptown, Sarnoski peppers the film with scenes that you genuinely believe would take place in this effective warzone. Sure, they have some harrowing encounters with the growing pack of monsters and, yes, there is one gratuitous sequence that feels like a flimsy excuse to reveal something new about the invaders just for franchise lore and, yes, we have no idea why Eric never takes his tie off or why Frodo doesn’t meow or hiss once, but you’ve got to suspend your disbelief somewhere. Especially for a movie that allows the proceedings to breathe like this one does. And we mean breathe. Krasinski was patient and talented enough to let events unfold at their own pace to spur tension when he was behind the camera, but Sarnoski is working on an auteur wavelength. He often lets the momentum stagnate just enough so the viewer can truly take in the staggering annihilation of a city now in ruins, full of death, and inherent quiet beauty.
None of this would come close to fruition, however, without Nyong’o and Quinn’s stirring performances. While the latter displays a hidden depth rarely seen in his previous work, Nyong’o delivers yet another committed and uncompromising turn. It will be hard for many to understand why someone even on death’s door wouldn’t do everything they can to immediately get to safe shores. But Nyong’o channels Sam’s survival instinct, what she needs to do to keep fighting for herself, with emphatic aplomb. If she can find something to fight for, that is. And while that scenario is rarely the subject of summer “blockbuster” fare, both she and Sarnoski intended to do everything in their considerable cinematic power to make sure you don’t forget it. Killer alien monsters or not. [B+/B]
“A Quiet Place: Day One” opens nationwide on Jan 28