A Quiet Place: Day One takes us right back to the moments leading up to, during, and after, the alien invasion that devastated Earth and left it in the state we found it in when the first movie was released back in 2018. While that movie, along with its 2020 sequel, focused on the Abbott family, this prequel does not. Thankfully though, it still proves to be a gripping and satisfying watch.
We’ve already had a taste of how day one of the invasion played out for the Abbotts and the town they live in courtesy of the opening scene in the 2020 sequel A Quiet Place Part II. But now, we get to see how it played out in one of the noisiest places in the world, New York City. Which, the opening scene informs us, is constantly emitting an average sound level of 90 decibels. So, the ideal hunting ground for those aliens and their keen sense of hearing!
Lupita Nyong’o is Sam, a cancer patient in hospice care. When we first meet Sam, she’s begrudgingly taking part in a group therapy session with nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff), where she reads out a poem that she’s written about just how shitty the hospice is. To try and cheer Sam up a little, Reuben later convinces her to join him and some of the other patients on a trip to New York to see a show, which she agrees to, but only if they go get pizza afterwards. Sam brings her cat Frodo with her and when Frodo isn’t cuddled up in her arms, he can be seen walking alongside her on a lead. Straight away, and knowing what’s coming, I’m concerned for the cat’s safety. It’s a feeling that rears its head on more occasions than I can remember throughout the rest of the movie.
After the show, Reuben tells Sam that they’re going to have to cancel getting pizza as they’ve been called back to the hospice due to some kind of incident that’s happening in the city. There’s definitely something going down, with military and police vehicles speeding by and sirens going off in the distance. And then we see it, those streaks of light raining down from the sky, as we saw in the previous film. One of them hits close by to the bus that Sam and the others are on and it’s like a bomb has gone off. Smoke and debris fill the air, covering everything and everyone. And people are just walking about in a daze. That is, until some of them start making a noise and we catch a flash of something slamming into them, whisking them away.
Sam is knocked unconscious and when she wakes a little later she finds herself back in the theatre with a large group of people who have quickly learned that you need to be absolutely silent in order to survive (what a shame that the people in the movie theatre I was in hadn’t learned that skill). The monsters are still outside, picking off the odd person who either hasn’t learnt the rules yet, or is unfortunate enough to accidentally make a noise. Frodo update – he’s still alive, and he seems fairly chill about the whole end-of-the-world situation that’s unfolding around him.
Somebody inside the theatre picks up on a message that the National Guard want everyone off the New York bridges so that they can destroy them in a desperate attempt to contain the creatures, which they’ve now discovered cannot swim. The advice to all residents is to carefully, and quietly, make their way through the city where boats will be able to evacuate them. Also in the theatre is Henri (Djimon Hounsou) and his family, who we saw sitting in front of Sam in the theatre show earlier. We know Henri from A Quiet Place Part II, where he was living peacefully with other survivors as part of an island colony, so a nice link to the previous movie, and good to know that the evacuation plan worked out well for a large number of people.
But Sam isn’t interested in the evacuation. She came to New York for pizza so that’s what she is focused on, looking to visit a place in Harlem that she and her dad used to go to when she was a child. Travelling in the opposite direction to the crowds of people all heading for the boats and managing to survive a few more creature attacks, Sam ends up befriending a scared British man called Eric (Joseph Quinn). Eric helps Sam to get some more much-needed meds and accompanies Sam with whatever time she has left so that she can fulfil her wish for pizza. Frodo update – he’s still going strong, doesn’t seem too phased by the huge nasty aliens, is able to find his way back to Sam after intense action scenes, still likes cuddles.
Third movie in and we’ve now seen the creatures enough times to know exactly how they operate and how deadly they can be, so there was a danger that Day One wouldn’t feel quite so fresh and intense, especially without the likeable duo of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. But Day One still manages to keep you on the edge of your seat, wringing the tension out of every long period of silence that’s suddenly broken by a noise, wondering if that noise has been heard and what the consequences will be.
Lupita Nyong’o is always reliable and that’s certainly the case here, playing a character with nothing to lose thanks to cancer, but still wanting to grab as much of life as possible, which does make for an emotionally satisfying movie. But the real star for me was Frodo (played by two cats, Schnitzel and Nico), who manages to go through a whole tonne of crap, including a dunk in the river, and still (spoiler alert) makes it to the end, alive and purring happily in someone’s arms.
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Web developer by day, with a movie and TV watchlist that continues to grow as much as my spare time reduces! My favourite movie is Inception and, despite what everyone says, I do not have a man-crush on Tom Cruise.
