‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Review: Disaster Silences New York
If a thriller can make you hold your breath for fear of being eaten by aliens while you’re sitting in the multiplex, it’s working pretty well, and “A Quiet Place: Day One” appropriately kept me in a frozen state, afraid to so much as crinkle a page in my notebook. It’s not a popcorn flick, though: Popcorn is too noisy. It’s more of a Raisinets movie.
The third entry in what is now the established “Quiet Place” franchise proves that Hollywood can still get a lot of mileage out of a perfect gimmick. This prequel, with an almost entirely new slate of characters (though Djimon Hounsou, from the second film, makes an appearance), begins with a charming introduction to a jaded but lovable cancer patient, Sam (the versatile Lupita Nyong’o), who is living in a hospice center in outer-borough New York but desperate for a slice of Manhattan pizza. Sam is dying and thought she’d never visit Manhattan again, but a friendly nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff), promises her the opportunity to see “a show,” which turns out to be a marionette performance.
A slightly more spectacular production is on view in the skies overhead, which exhibit the telltale signs of one of those alien invasions we New Yorkers have gotten used to seeing on screen. On the ground, the interlopers turn out to be gigantic, mouthy bugs with fearsome crab legs. The budgets of the films in the series have grown with their success, and so the creatures were only barely glimpsed in 2018’s “A Quiet Place,” the original entry. Now we see them clawing their way up skyscrapers, bursting through windows and skittering down the avenues of the city. (If it seems like an alien vision of New York in more ways than one, that’s because the picture was primarily filmed in London.) Still, being blind but hypersensitive to sound, the bugs at least have the effect of putting a hush on this clamorous city, whose everyday noise is, according to an opening title, at the same decibel level as a scream. Sounds about right.
Writer-director Michael Sarnoski, taking over the reins from John Krasinski, who directed the first two entries, is proving to be a skillful new filmmaker. He made his feature debut three years ago with “Pig,” a poignant indie drama containing elements of a thriller, in which Nicolas Cage played a grieving chef turned truffle hunter on a mission to find his stolen animal. In his latest, Mr. Sarnoski does an unusually careful job establishing his characters. The challenge for a genre piece such as this one is: Would we bother watching these people if they weren’t being chased? Here we would. Writers of horror movies are understandably focused on getting to the scares the audience wants and hence are often content to write only two character types—“sure to be killed” or “incredibly brave and resourceful.” Mr. Krasinski himself fell into this trap in “A Quiet Place,” in which the family man he portrayed was so noble that he was a cartoon—Superdad.
In “Day One,” Mr. Sarnoski immediately crafts an amusing interplay between Reuben and Sam (and her cat, Frodo, who becomes a delightful presence in his own right). The film then builds up our interest in her by gradually revealing aspects of her past self, before she got sick. She also strikes up an odd but warm friendship with an English law student, Eric (Joseph Quinn), whom she meets when he starts following her on the street in a daze.
She’s going in the wrong direction, though: Authorities flying overhead in helicopters order the survivors to head downtown, to South Street Seaport, so that they can be evacuated on ferries to evade the monsters, who can’t swim. (Given that they came from the sky, however, this gambit seems unlikely to be of much use in the long run.) Sam is heading instead for a famous Italian pizzeria uptown, in Harlem, although a slice of pepperoni is not the only reason for the trek. Since she has a lethal case of cancer, her calculus is, intriguingly, a little different from that of others in the story, or in other horror movies.
The constraints of the situation mean Eric and Sam speak very little (though they use the camouflage of ambient sound such as rain to whisper a few words), yet Mr. Sarnoski nevertheless establishes a meaningful bond between them, only occasionally resorting to a hokey interlude such as the one in which Eric grandly does a magic trick for her. Their interactions raise the level of storytelling from alien spectacle to human drama, and creating something much more engaging than a mere monster-chase saga amounts to something of a magic trick by Mr. Sarnoski. This franchise still has many scary days ahead of it.