'A Quiet Place: Day One': Review

Dir/scr: Michael Sarnoski. US. 2024. 100mins

If the end is nigh, then maybe the most important thing we can do is take care of one another. That message is at the heart of A Quiet Place: Day One, a modest but effectively melancholy prequel to the hit 2018 action-horror film. Taking viewers back to the initial alien invasion that set the franchise in motion, this latest instalment introduces new characters and themes while preserving the previous two pictures’ nerve-wracking tension. Day One never reaches the inspired heights of what came before, but Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn are compelling as strangers forced to work together in a devastated New York.

A modest but effectively melancholy prequel

Paramount has set a June 28 release date for the UK and US, the studio hoping to extend a franchise that has grossed more than $638 million worldwide over the first two films. Original director John Krasinski has handed the reins over to Pig writer-director Michael Sarnoski, and Emily Blunt, the star of A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, is not involved in this prequel. But Nyong’o’s star power should help compensate, although Day One’s main attraction are those frightening monsters who follow sound to attack, which requires the characters to be as silent as possible.

Battling terminal cancer and feeling defeated by her circumstances, Samira (Nyong’o) reluctantly goes on a field trip with her fellow hospice-centre residents into Manhattan, longing to eat the pizza which she has been unable to enjoy because of her condition. But once she gets into the city, horrifying sightless aliens attack from the skies, slaughtering anything that makes a noise. With her loyal cat Frodo by her side, Samira tries her best to stay quiet, encountering a shaken law student named Eric (Quinn, a Screen Star Of Tomorrow in 2018) who, like her, has nobody else. 

Sarnoski, who also wrote Day One, tells a story that is more of a footnote than a bold new chapter in the series. But this prequel’s relative smallness has its advantages, focusing on an intimate tale of a woman bitterly resigned to dying who, through this extraordinary situation, finds reasons to savour what remains of her life. Nyong’o helps elevate that admittedly cliched character arc, grounding Samira so that we feel her anger and disillusionment — and then, later, her sadness as she journeys on foot to a Harlem pizza joint that holds sentimental value for her. But the Oscar-winning actress, superb in another horror film, Us, is also adept during Day One’s taut suspense sequences, her large, expressive eyes conveying her character’s understandable terror as the aliens converge on her.

For 2018’s A Quiet Place, Krasinski maximised the film’s central hook, turning the characters’ need to stay quiet at all times into a perpetual tension, the silence during the picture’s anxiety-inducing set pieces almost unbearable. Although the novelty of the device may have worn off, Day One continues to exploit that idea to strong effect. Cinematographer Pat Scola and production designer Simon Bowles conceive a Manhattan that has been pulverised by the aliens, whose unnerving, inhuman clicking remains the franchise’s most disturbing element. And Sarnoski rarely resorts to cheap jump scares or boneheaded character decisions to artificially manufacture dramatic stakes, even if the plotting does get a little thin at points.

Intriguingly, the writer-director does depart from the earlier films’ emphasis on family and parenthood. Instead, this prequel examines two single, childless characters from very different worlds who must form a tight unit if they are to survive. Quinn is saddled with a character who is not as well written, but is nevertheless affecting as a man who perhaps was lonely even before this alien assault. In Samira, he finds a possible friend in the midst of the apocalypse – even if they do forge a bond over their shared understanding that, if they escape these ferocious extra-terrestrials, their fate is still likely sealed.

In keeping with Day One’s earnest, sentimental undercurrents, Samira’s cat Frodo (played by two felines, Schnitzel and Nico) becomes a crucial figure, offering the characters (and the audience) a comforting respite from the scare scenes. Pet owners will rightly complain that Frodo is the quietest, most obedient — and, therefore, most unrepresentative — feline in history, but there is also a charm to the way that Sarnoski clings to these small moments of domestic normalcy. Anyone who has seen the previous A Quiet Place films knows that an exuberant happy ending is not awaiting Samira and Eric but, in the time they have together, perhaps they can find things that will make life a little better. It might be a cute cat or a delicious slice of pizza — or, maybe, the determination to hold onto their humanity as civilization collapses around them.