With a premise that was ingeniously tense on its first outing but only stood up to the most minimal of scrutiny, A Quiet Place was perhaps an unlikely franchise-starter, but start a franchise it did and now here we are with the third instalment, prequel Day One. The first in the series to not be directed by original creator-star John Krasinski or written by the original scripting duo, its flash back to the first few days of the alien invasion amidst the chaos of New York under attack, it’s a film that both expands the franchise’s horizons to their grandest yet, whilst also delivering the most effectively intimate story of the series.
Ditching the original protagonist family, Day One finds us following Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill woman on a day trip to New York with her nurse (played by Alex Wolff) on the day that happens to be armageddon. Soon, the series’ iconic blind-but-hypersensitive to sound aliens are raining from the sky in massive numbers, turning New York into a slaughterhouse and bringing about the end of the world in a matter of hours. Determined to go out on her own terms, Samira (along with her cat, who turns in a phenomenal animal performance) soon abandons the group of survivors she’s holed up with to find her favourite pizza shop and get one last slice before everything ends.
She’s joined on this journey by Eric (Joseph Quinn), a terrified British law student who immediately latches on to Samira after sensing that she’s not as scared as everyone else, and it’s in this relationship that Day One really shines. New writer-director Michael Sarnoski was the man behind the truly excellent Nic Cage drama Pig, and his specific brand of humanism is a great fit for Quiet Place. He takes this sombre-but-silly alien-invasion horror and turns it into a platonic love story, an ode to how our love and empathy and capacity to form strong bonds is what will save us when our strength and bullets fail.
Nyong’o and Quinn are a terrific lead duo, fear and hope and resignation flickering across their faces as they stare down the end of the world, both embracing the classic Quiet Place challenge of telling us about these characters mostly wordlessly. If this all sounds like Day One might have a lot of downtime, that’s because it rather does – though Sarnoski does rustle up some exciting set-pieces (on a bigger scale than anything in the previous two films), this is not as taut or effective as a thriller as its predecessors.
This might be an admittedly understandable dealbreaker for some (the rules of this universe and its hyper-hearing baddies have also never been looser than they are here), but Sarnoski – who has been allowed an impressive amount of creative leeway here – is clearly less interested in monsters that in what it is that makes us better than monsters. He finds his highly affecting answer in our loyalty, our beyond-language understanding of one another, and, of course, in our love for cats.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 