It’s easy to forget that A Quiet Place was so successful because it truly made you care about the Abbott family, despite its catchy nobody-make-a-sound premise (Watch that nail! Get out of the grain silo! You’re actually giving birth in that bathtub!). The heart of the original was the grieving parents of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. As such, the spin-off A Quiet Place: Day One, which focuses on humanity’s initial encounter with the audibly enhanced aliens, leaves glaring gaps in the story. It avoids the Abbott clan as well as the first film’s evocative post-collapse setting from 2021.
Over the course of a dreadful, horrible, no good, very bad day in fresh York City, writer-director Michael Sarnoski—who was previously behind Pig and took over from Krasinski—presents a fresh pair of characters into that void. The opening paragraph of the movie A Quiet Place describes the Big Apple’s everyday bustle as having “the volume of a constant scream,” making it an enticing backdrop for the film. Lupita Nyong’o is a wonderful fit for the role of protagonist Sam; her wide-eyed stare from Jordan Peele’s Us already demonstrated this. The fact that Sam has terminal cancer is revealed to us right away, which provides some interesting subject material. Day One so explores the idea that accepting the end of your own life is equivalent to accepting the end of the world.
A quiet place film that is simultaneously a personal character drama.
Sam’s goals are very different from the typical survival-movie fodder, as her days are running out. Her travels through the city bring her into contact with Eric (Josh Quinn, the breakout star of Stranger Things 4), a Brit who is also lost in the urban apocalypse. Quinn has a charmingly melancholic spirit without seeming clingy, and Eric and Sam’s growing bond is evident. In the most memorable scene in the movie, the two are reading poems while they wait for thunder to roll so they can cry out into the sky about their suffering. These two may have had a Before Sunrise-type relationship in a previous existence. That they never will gets more and more devastating.
The alien invasion scenes are less interesting, even if they are well-written and suspenseful. The Quiet Place formula is quiet-quiet-NOISE-run! – seems more and more worn out. Though NYC is a fantastic end-of-the-world playground (the opening attack is reminiscent of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds), there isn’t much freshness to the set pieces.
Despite all of the familiarity—a satisfying “Part III” ought to be the conclusion—Sam and Eric’s narrative is surprisingly touching. Under Sarnoski’s direction, Day One transforms into a personal character drama that also happens to be an A Quiet Place film, providing more evidence that a person’s heart is the only bodily part more important than their ears in this world of movies.
Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn’s powerful performances elevate a good A Quiet Place entry, telling a surprisingly poignant story of the end of the world.