One of the reasons A Quiet Place is so special is that no one saw it coming. A novelty creature feature directed by that dude from The Office? On paper it’s a pretty easy thing to roll one’s eyes at, but in execution it turned out to be something exceptional and unique. We all expected a shiny, forgettable, middle-of-the-road horror flick, and instead got a deeply moving, character-forward thriller that introduced John Krasinski’s directorial skills to a wider audience. It felt like lightning in a bottle, and most assumed that it couldn’t be captured again. Plenty of high-concept genre bangers get an unneeded sequel, and they are almost universally inferior. Surely, a sequel would pale in comparison to such a stunning opening chapter.
A Quiet Place Part II, a film delayed by the COVID pandemic, was poised to take the novelty of the concept (don’t make a sound or you will be eaten by monsters) and milk it for a few passable jump scares. My hopes were certainly not high. I expected it would be…fine.
And yet again I was surprised. Not only was it a worth successor to the original, but it staked its claim as one of the truly great horror sequels. There’s no possible way they’d be able to pull it off a third time, right? Right?!?
…right.
A Quiet Place: Day One is exactly the movie we all expected the original and its sequel to be: Run-of-the-mill studio horror filled with pretty faces and scary monsters. Well, pretty faces at least. The monsters aren’t scary anymore. The performances are strong and there are a handful of effective moments, but nothing about this pointless prequel elevates it above any other gimmicky spooker. It’s your Bird Box, your Light’s Out, your Annabelle. Not that any of those films are bad, but they’re not particularly notable. Day One isn’t outright bad either, but after its two exceptional predecessors, and with the writer/director of Pig at the helm, it’s a hell of a disappointment.
Lupita Nyong’o plays Samira, a terminally-ill woman on a day trip to Manhattan courtesy of the hospice facility where she spends her days. Midway through the trip the monsters arrive on Earth, and now Sam and her adorable cat Frodo are scrambling to survive amidst the chaos. She soon meets up with Eric (Joseph Quinn) a law student with a much shakier constitution than Sam’s. The three (Sam, Eric, and Frodo — a double literary reference) must now survive amidst the sudden chaos as they make their way to the seaport where rescue ferries await.
The film opens with a title card indicating that New York City, at its quietest, operates at the decibel level of a scream. Theres an interesting idea here: what does a city suddenly forced to be dead silent look like? It’s a hell of scary thought, and it makes a promise that the film fails to live up to. Imagine New Yorkers struggling to understand the methodology of this attack. Imagine a city of millions figuring out the biology of the creatures while also trying to survive? Well, keep imagining because it’s not explored here at all. The entirety of the population figures out that the monsters hunt by sound pretty much immediately. Everyone just sorta knows. It’s as if they saw the first two movies. And for all its history of “the city itself is a character,” the Big Apple might as well be any city in the world. Not for a second does it feel like New York, nor is its identity applied outside of its geography (Manhattan being an island is what allows for the general narrative thrust to occur). There’s no sense of identity anywhere, and for the most part, it feels almost entirely digitally rendered. Maybe I’ve become too picky, but it’s become increasingly easy to determine when a scene was digitally painted over a green box, and it feels like this way for most of Day One. It doesn’t help that after the first few minutes, it seems like there’s no one left in the city at all.
There’s an admirable attempt here to make this as character-driven as its predecessors, but for all of the talents and efforts of our leads, it feels forced. The idea of a man who doesn’t want to die teaming up with a woman whose fate has already been sealed by illness is indeed interesting, but there’s little to chew on beyond that general dichotomy. He wants to live, she wants one good slice of pizza before calling it a day/life. There are a few sweet and tender moments that are elevated by Quinn and Nyong’o (both innocent here — it’s the script that fails them), even if their characters aren’t written with much depth. I care about them because I know to care about them because that’s how movies work, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about who they are.
Yet for all the film’s misgivings, it does lead to a tremendous final 20 minutes or so which deliver and intensity and excitement that is on par with the opening sequence of A Quiet Place Part II (which also takes place on ‘day one’). It functions well in a visceral sense while checking the gimmicky boxes of a high-concept horror sequel. It’s both thrilling and scary, and by this point we’ve spent enough time with our characters that despite the shortcomings of the script, we’ve come to care about them enough so that the action has the weight that the preceding hour-and-change failed to muster. And whatever emotional gaps remain are filled by the cat. We love a cat. We root for cat. Go cat!
I’ve never been the type to fault a franchise for going one entry too far, nor am I so precious about canon that any one entry can “ruin” the original. Since it’s all imaginary anyway (and I’m way too big a Halloween fan to get upset about such things), it’s easy for me to simply ignore any material that doesn’t work for me. That said, it breaks my heart a little to ignore A Quiet Place: Day One. It’s not a bad film, but it’s a disappointingly standard entry in a series that defined itself by subverting and exceeding expectations. It’s what we all expected the first two films to be: a shiny, forgettable, middle-of-the-road horror flick.
Directed by Michael Sarnoski
Written by Michael Sarnoski, John Krasinski, Bryan Woods, Scott Beck
Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Honsou, Nico the Cat
Rated PG-13, 100 minutes