‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Review: Lupita Nyong’o Stands Out In A Melancholy Action-Horror Prequel
Lupita Nyong'o in 'A Quiet Place: Day One' Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
Perhaps emboldened by the critical success of the Long, Long Time episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, production company Platinum Dunes takes the third episode in its post-apocalyptic A Quiet Place franchise into surprisingly melancholy territory. It’s an interesting alternative to the usual more-is-more approach that James Cameron patented with the first of the Alien sequels, and Lupita Nyong’o has a spiky but vulnerable presence that definitely makes a change from the now-clichéd kick-ass heroine. As an action-horror hybrid, however, Day One feels more like an ambitious indie than a summer studio movie, and its downbeat tone leaves an unexpectedly glum comedown.
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The establishing setup introduces us to Sam (Nyong’o), a terminal patient in a suburban New York hospice. Her mood is one of bitterness and grim defiance as she is compelled to take part in group therapy, reading an unfinished self-penned poem that declares “This place is sh*t” and goes on to the explain some of the many reasons why that should be, most notably because that “cancer is sh*t”. The group leader, Reuben (Alex Wolff), tries to encourage her — “That was great,” he enthuses, somewhat unconvincingly — and invites her on a theater trip to Manhattan. Sam accepts, but only if they’ll stop for pizza after.
The entertainment turns out to be a lo-fi puppet show, which Sam suffers in silence with her service cat Frodo sitting in her lap. Afterwards, any pizza plans are scuppered when the sound of police sirens fills the air and the skyline becomes a blitz of vapor trails. Recalling the aftermath of 9/11, smoke and ash obscure Sam’s — and our — vision, conjuring up an eerie, disorientating mood as the now-familiar hordes of insectoid creatures make their entrance, destroying cars and buildings and snatching up screaming humans.
Finally, an explosion knocks Sam out, and she wakes up back in the theater, where she is reunited with Reuben and, amazingly, Frodo. Somehow, enough time has passed for everyone to know the rules of engagement: the aliens are drawn to sound, and the shift of location to urban Manhattan (where we’re told the average volume is 90 decibels, the equivalent of “a constant scream”) makes for an interesting comparison with the previous sequels. At the theater, Sam learns of a plan to ferry survivors to safety, since the aliens are unable to cross water, and all bridges to the island have been destroyed.
But instead of joining them, Sam heads in the opposite direction, up towards Harlem, ostensibly to find a pizza joint but in reality to reconnect with her childhood and the memories of her father that are rooted there. Along the way, she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), an English law student who simply manifests himself into the movie — emerging, ghost-like, from a waterlogged subway entrance — and becomes Sam’s travel companion, despite her best efforts to shake him off. Like Sam, Eric is hardly the archetype for this type of movie, and such an offbeat pairing, on a such oddly fatalistic mission, tends to work against the tension created whenever Day One erupts into action mode.
Director Michael Sarnoski made his name with the 2021 Nicolas Cage movie Pig, and it’s easy to see his signature here, both metaphorically, in Sam’s monomaniacal obsession with pizza, and literally, in Frodo the cat (which, spoiler alert, has better luck than most of its co-stars). As in Pig, the hero’s journey is one of introspection, which is admirable enough but very much makes Day One a film that toggles between two very different modes and moods.
For the squeamish, the sound design may well be enough — a creepy chattering sound heralds the creatures’ spidery presence — but, as is the norm in monster movies, we end up seeing a little too much of them at close quarters. In one memorable scene, Eric comes face to face with one and narrowly escapes a vicious chomping, but a good jump scare is held a little too long, offering audiences a chance to marvel at the special effects work and giving nightmare fuel for anyone scared of globe artichokes and colonoscopies.
Given that, the focus on character is a smart move, since the novelty value of A Quiet Place is going to be hard to maintain going forward, and the generous use of score suggests even the makers don’t have a lot of faith in the power of silence any more. It delivers enough frights for the time being, though, and the casting of Nyong’o carries it to the finish line for the best scene of the whole movie. In that respect, Day One may feasibly do what Jordan Peele’s Us so unfairly didn’t, and if it does carry her through to awards season, it will finally prove that the old saw about genre movies and the Academy is finally a thing of the past.
Title: A Quiet Place: Day One
Director/screenwriter: Michael Sarnoski
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff
Studio: Paramount
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 39 min