The first words you see upon a wide shot of New York City of director Michael Sarnoski’s ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ is that noise level averages 90 decibels — which would mirror a constant scream. That’s horrible news when you consider how the ferocious aliens (called Death Angels in canon) operate concerning sound and how densely populated the city is. It’s a recipe for disaster and carnage. In 2021’s ‘A Quiet Place Part II,’ the film slightly looks at the first day of this invasion from the original family’s perspective. Like any prequel wants to do, it wants to widen the scope and tell other stories. It’s not only the tense moments where the series protagonist has to re-work the concept of noise and communication that’s made this franchise successful — for a world-ending phenomenon, these films have an intimate emotional quality.
So, yes, ‘Day One’ has many of the scenes you’d come to expect, albeit on a larger scale. Still, Sarnoski injects the quiet meditations of 2021’s ‘Pig’ into this DNA to give it a hearty rumination of what the end of the world means from two people on opposite sides of the moral coin. Sarnoski and co-writer John Krasinski elect to keep the alien origins and explanations as to why they have chosen our planet close to the chest. That might be somewhat frustrating, given conventional sci-fi tropes. I have found seeing the morsels of descriptions and possible remedies as the people on the ground get them as refreshing. There’s a delicate balance of unraveling the mystery and not undoing it too much to take away from the communal aspect this franchisee is going for.
Djimon Hounsou as “Henri”, Lupita Nyong’o as “Samira” and Alex Wolff as “Reuben” in A Quiet Place: Day One from Paramount Pictures.
In a hospice care facility, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is unfortunately waiting out her last days as a stage four cancer patient. As you can imagine, she’s a little bit irritable given this prospect, even reading a poem called “This Place Is Sh*t” in a group meeting. Reuben (Alex Wolff), a nurse at the facility, tries to help her, but Sam is uninterested. Instead, her companion is her loyal cat named Frodo. Reuben offers Sam to accompany him and the other patients to a marionette show in the city on this particular day. The sweetener in this outing is that Sam wants one specific thing: pizza. New York City has an abundance of pizza, and when you’re living in your supposed last days, you want to indulge in the things you love the most. However, there’s an extra tie into why Sam wants this and Nyong’o’s portrayal of a thorny, but slowly letting her guard-down character play beautifully into this.
Things don’t devolve right away. There are helicopters, ambulances, and a couple of armored vehicles in the background, but this is New York City. As a trademark to the franchise, the slow build of frenzy smacks you into a wall once the aliens descend upon the buildings. Instead of one or a couple of these Death Angels, there are more than 20 at a time — running through the populated streets like collective buzzsaws. Pat Scola’s camera work approaches these scenes from a fuzzy, shell-shocked perspective complete with smoke, dust, and these monster quickly snatching up people to take them off-screen. It’s the blunt nature of how this happens that tries to utilize the PG-13 rating as best as possible. You get an enormous sense of the carnage as the lone characters silently sift through the streets and see torn cars, bloodstains, and ripped-apart buildings. These scenes repeat themselves in succession, as if ‘Day One’ is looking to stagger the moments because we see such a small character base. That is one of the drawbacks of having this story occur in a sprawling place like New York City. While we witness bridges get destroyed, and measures occur to shrink the setting, the image of what it is is still in your mind.
Joseph Quinn as “Eric” and Lupita Nyong’o as “Samira” in A Quiet Place: Day One from Paramount Pictures.
While the remaining survivors try to find the best way out, Sam is unconcerned. She is entirely focused on the mission, which seems wild considering what’s happening around her. Things further focus when she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), an English law student shaken by emerging from a flooded subway. Sam is not looking for a friend and even beckons Eric to go to the evacuation point. Despite this, his need for something to anchor him is what appeals to her still present sympathy. Sarnoski’s bread and butter of his take on this franchise is within two people who have to level what with what the end is. You still have the chase sequences (now with more glass buildings) and those moments where the slight jingle of a bell might work against them you’d come to expect from these films.
What is more pressing is how Quinn and Nyong’o’s characters work off each other in empathy for their current circumstances. If you thought you had your whole life ahead of you, what happens when that is not true? At one point, Eric says to Sam, “This wasn’t part of the plan” — a simple line that holds a varying amount of weight for both of them. Alien invasions are never included in life challenges, but sometimes, neither are diseases. Sarnoski infuses ‘Day One’ with much of the ‘Quiet Place’ ingredients you’ve learned, but doubles down on more of coming to grips with the catharsis of running out of time. Sometimes, we need somebody to lean on when the world falls upon us.
