A Quiet Place: Day One passes as air-conditioned entertainment on a sweltering summer day mainly by reproducing the ample advantages that made 2018’s A Quiet Place a gripping watch. As the third addition to the series �� one of the few promising horror franchises of the past decade — Day One is a fruitless detour.
As protagonist Samira, immediately introduced alongside her leashed cat Frodo in an in-patient hospice facility, Lupita Nyong’o shines in the spotlight within the confines of a shallow script. When an afternoon invasion brings athletic human-hunting monsters from outer space to Manhattan, she navigates a few jarring minutes of chaos, violence and destruction before meeting Henry (Joseph Quinn), a hapless lawyer (or law student? Information not available to the audience) who inexplicably sacrifices any plans to escape certain death on the island in order to cheer her up. Henry joins Samira in her trek to a Harlem pizzeria, the movie’s only plot point, which becomes slightly more logical when we learn of its childhood significance to Samira — and comes to represent an existential quest to exercise agency over her death.
Wide-angle shots, a recognizable American dystopia and the constant, silent tension produced by powerful monsters with hyper-sensitive hearing make Day One a moderately entertaining action movie best enjoyed in IMAX. These are the same characteristics that helped make hits out of the first two movies, which follow a homesteading nuclear family headed by Emily Blunt and John Krasinski a year into the invasion. The family accrues emotional investment via a fierce, logic-defying, often ingenious quest to persist, outmatched against an enemy of unknown strength and provenance. Various complicating challenges — like a deaf eldest daughter (Millicent Simmonds) and Blunt’s rapidly progressing pregnancy — helped infuse the first movie with mounting tension.
Day One tries to manufacture similar sympathy for Samira, stuck to navigate her death with only Frodo as family. Director Michael Sarnoski — stepping in for Krasinski, who directed the first two films — begins to succeed in a few touching scenes pre-invasion. But Samira’s pathos quickly has to compete with the ambient trauma of shell-shocked refugees abandoned by their government and fleeing the ever-present threat of instant evisceration. As the movie morphs into an extended chase scene through dusty Manhattan, poignant moments like a primal scream shared by Samira and Henry during a thunderclap become fewer and further between. Day One recycles powerful but familiar plot devices for its climax.
Besides a brief moment when monsters communicate over what appears to be a yarn-like nest, the movie adds nothing to the audience’s understanding of humanity’s shared foe or the larger sociopolitical dynamics at play on invaded Earth. Contributions to that understanding could have left fans with a satisfying prequel in the run-up to 2025’s A Quiet Place Part III, which will seal the fate of the series’ original characters. Instead, Day One only gives us more lives to worry about in a fragile world brimming with death.
