A Quiet Place: Day One review – noise-free alien-invasion prequel starts with a bang
On a sentimental mission … Sam in A Quiet Place: Day One. Photograph: Gareth Gatrell/AP
The hideous novelty is leaking a little from what now has to be called the Quiet Place franchise, about humans of the future forced to live in a permanent state of tremblingly paranoid silence because they are terrorised by alien monsters who can’t see but will pounce at the slightest sound. This prequel, directed by Michael Sarnoski (the creator of Pig, starring Nicolas Cage) shows two strangers finding a connection on the very first day of the aliens’ attack; it is well made and well acted, with a fervent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o.
Nyong’o plays Sam, a woman with cancer in hospice care, who is spiky and difficult with her nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff). When longsuffering Reuben takes Sam and other patients for a trip into New York for a treat (oddly, a marionette show – but with very few kids in the audience), the creepy, blind creatures attack. They cause apocalyptic chaos, and Sam finds herself randomly befriending a terrified British law student called Eric, played by the estimable Joseph Quinn, who gave such an intense performance in Luna Carmoon’s psychodrama Hoard.
Unlike the previous two films, which show people who have evolved their survivor silence over time, this movie must rather hurriedly accelerate the humans’ learning of this. We see a lot more of what the monsters look like, and, like Ridley Scott’s aliens, they have a nasty habit of shoving their horrible faces right up close to their aghast and immobile potential victims.
Sam is on a sentimental mission to find, just once more before she dies, the jazz-club-slash-pizza-parlour in Harlem to which her dad used to take her in childhood. And, of course, the fact that she has cancer is supposed to mean that she has simultaneously nothing to lose, having been so habituated to imminent death, but is also able to live intensely in the present. Audiences may feel uneasy at her apparently sacrificial role, wiser than Eric but also more disposable. It’s an efficient, if familiar, spectacle of suspense.
• A Quiet Place: Day One is out in the UK and Australia on 27 June, and in the US on 28 June.