A Quiet Place: Day One Review: It Was Right to Expect Something More?
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Djimon Hounsou, Alex Wolff
Directed By: Michael Sarnoski
Where to Watch: In Theaters
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
A Quiet Place: Day One arrives in theaters today, bringing back the saga that, begun in 2018 thanks to John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, had revived the post-apocalyptic and sci-fi horror genre, garnering unanimous acclaim from audiences and critics. After the second episode, released in 2021, now it’s the turn of the prequel/spinoff, directed by Michael Sarnoski, with Krasinski and Michael Bay producing. The final result is certainly pleasant in various sequences and moments, however, net of Lupita Nyong’O’s talent, it lacks a real ability to amaze, it lacks originality and the ability to go beyond the homework, to slavishly or almost imitate the other two episodes, without bringing any particular innovations. This is a new chapter which, while waiting for the third film of the main series, therefore offers a new perspective on the story, even if limited to a few characters and essentially to a rather narrow range of action. However, we can take that of A Quiet Place: Day One as an emblem of what may have also happened in other parts of the United States and the world.
What is interesting is the first approach with the aliens, the discovery of their abilities and their weaknesses, as well as the first reactions from humanity, and in this, the film does not disappoint. That A Quiet Place was one of the most important and milestone science fiction sagas of contemporary cinema was already understood in 2018, when the first and explosive chapter for the big screen directed by John Krasinski and starring the same man together with Emily Blunt debuted in theaters around the world. The unexpected success of the founding film was then followed by the excellent and adrenaline-filled A Quiet Place: Part II in 2020, to which from Thursday 27 June in all theaters added the very solid and moving A Quiet Place: Day One. The direction passes from Krasinski (who however remains the author of the original story of this prequel as well) to Michael Sarnoski, in the limelight in 2021 with his debut feature film Pig.
A Quiet Place: Day One Review: The Story Plot
A Quiet Place: Day One takes us to the beginning of the invasion of the so-called “Angels of Death”, the terrifying and bloodthirsty aliens who in the first A Quiet Place we understood had reduced the Earth into a sort of gigantic carnage. Equipped with fearful strength, extremely ferocious, with apparently indestructible armor, they had forced the few survivors to embrace a life where silence was the only weapon to survive. Their arrival on Earth, aboard the remains of their planet, here coincides with a trip that Reuben (Alex Wolff), a nurse, has prepared for his patients, almost all of whom are cancer patients. Among these, the one with whom he has the closest relationship is Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), who, armed with cynicism, a sense of humor, and the inseparable cat Frodo, follows him to the Big Apple, to attend a theater show together with the others. Within a short time, however, aliens begin to appear in droves on the streets of the city, bringing death and terror everywhere.
Sam, who constantly needs drugs and painkillers, will begin a fight for survival which will become, thanks to the fortuitous meeting with Erico (Joseph Quinn), a chance to rediscover what she liked about life, make peace with her condition, while everything around her death, destruction and panic besiege everyone and the city becomes a gigantic open-air slaughterhouse. From the beginning, A Quiet Place: Day One shows that it does not want to stray an inch from what the previous two episodes had been, of which it imitates the narrative nature of a micro-story in the most absolute sense, its identity as a personal odyssey within a global catastrophe, experienced through the eyes of a protagonist, to whom Lupita Nyong’o can give profound humanity, verisimilitude, and realism. In her, we certainly have the most convincing part of a film which however, after an encouraging and also visually impactful start, begins to slip perhaps a little too much into sentimentality, into melody even, to go around in circles as if it didn’t know how evolve.
This is by Sarnoski’s writing, which appears in several places undecided whether to be, as in the two previous films, a list of terrifying sequences, or to also turn to the metaphorical, becoming a symbol of the absence of silence and listening in our present. In short, this prequel/spin-off is a film that shows its cards right from the start, and they are honest cards, they are also humble from certain points of view, but it was reasonable to expect a change of gear, perhaps something that recalls the I remember all the excellent ideas seen in films such as World War Z, in short, it was time to offer something different, instead of showing us well or always the usual atmosphere and the usual scenes, which from the middle onwards simply stop scaring the viewer or giving even the slightest emotion.
New York, in the present day. The young Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is a terminally ill girl who is following her treatments inside a specialized hospital and in the company of an inseparable support cat named Frodo. When the young woman decides to venture into the big city to attend a puppet show in a theater in the nerve center of the Big Apple, the unexpected happens mysterious and very dangerous aliens descend from the sky to invade the Planet Earth, killing every human being in their path, but there’s more. These creatures from space are particularly sensitive to any type of sound or noise, so Sam will soon learn at her expense that to survive in the middle of a devastated and silent metropolis she will have to remain as silent as a fish. And team up unexpectedly with Eric (Joseph Quinn), an English boy who miraculously survived the alien attack and who suffers from panic attacks.
Thus begins A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel spinoff no longer in the expert hands of actor and director John Krasinski, nor written by the duo formed by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck who had taken care of the first two cinematic chapters; the baton passes to director and screenwriter Michael Sarnoski, who takes care of writing the original script (from a story created by Krasinski himself) and bringing it to the big screen behind the camera. The result is a new rough and effective chapter, which chooses a larger and more metropolitan setting to tell the devastating effects of the alien attack on the very first day of the invasion, instead of the dramas of the Abbott family that had moved and entertained viewers around the world in the first two films.
A Quiet Place: Day One Review and Analysis
A Quiet Place: Day One also makes the mistake of not using the city that serves as its backdrop in sufficient depth: New York. The Big Apple has always been the favorite cinematic stage for every alien invasion and catastrophe that can be remembered, and it would have a lot, a lot to give here too. Just think of Cloverfield, another saga that has shaped the history of post-apocalyptic sci-fi for better or worse. Instead, in this film we remain following the trail of this woman, desperate and at the same time endowed with a feral determination, with a survival instinct unique to her kind, but weighed down by a diegetic process that appears at certain moments to be all too elementary. The same goes for the evolution of her personality about Eric’s, and also how the two give each other moments of understanding and tenderness honestly appears to be a very little successful or rich level of global conception. In the end, the truly most original thing is to use the cat, Frodo, as a sort of Dante’s guide, a feline lookalike of Virgil, who however in turn becomes a deus ex machina of events, as well as the symbol of hope, of possible ways out of a catastrophe throughout the film.
A Quiet Place: Day One then shows us only partial truths and specifies very little about the aliens themselves, again terrifying, whose characteristics and origins remain unknown to us. In short, A Quiet Place: Day One is not a film that even from this point of view knows how to do without the first two, objectively far superior, chapters of the saga. A Quiet Place: Day One naturally connects a bit like War of the Worlds, to the concept of normality that sinks into chaos and horror, to this elsewhere that falls upon us, leaving our entire civilization and all points of reference in tatters. If at least in this film the protagonists do not indulge in macroscopic errors contrary to all logic and intelligence, it is also true that in the finale A Quiet Place: Day One becomes incredibly predictable, almost sappy, it forgets to give us what we wanted: the macro dimension of this terrifying invasion that, as we understood in the previous films, is not stopped or hindered in the slightest by humanity.
If there is one thing that a film like Independence Day has made us understand, it is that only by giving the global dimension of this tragedy or starting from the personal dimension and then broadening the view as a masterpiece like 28 Days Later did, can the deepest emotional chords of the audience be touched. This of course does not mean that the intimate approach chosen by John Krasinski in the two previous episodes was wrong, indeed it was the most incredible part of the film but repeating it for the third time in a row gives the impression that this third chapter of the saga is nothing more than a derivative work, with a very popular name as bait. It remains a well-shot film, the special effects are very good, and the “Angels of Death” continue to be among the most evil and successful aliens of the genre. The final judgment, in any case, tells us that perhaps it is time to start exploring the possibility of a television series, or if you want to continue the sag at the cinema, stop repeating the same music over and over again.
Nothing new under the sun then for the third narrative piece of A Quiet Place which, respecting the tradition of films directed by John Krasinski, places at the center of the action two or more protagonists of great psychological depth and an alien invasion accompanied by a care for the sound design of the highest order. Narratological novelties that had made a bit of the extraordinary success of the founding chapter of 2018, embellished by a winning mix of unbearable tension and a dramatic hat of rare effectiveness. Of course, the absence in front of the camera of the Abbott family led by the charismatic John Krasinski and Emily Blunt is felt, but Michael Sarnoski has written a cinematic script supported by a duo of interpreters of great depth and stage power: on one side the Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o (here in one of her most intense and successful roles), on the other the rising British interpreter Joseph Quinn, seen and loved in the fourth season of Stranger Things and who we will see again in the coming months in Gladiator II, in the role of Emperor Caracalla.
Both actors are the real driving force of A Quiet Place: Day One, well-defined characters who carry with them burdens of life that are difficult to throw away: if Sam, the protagonist of the film, is a young woman struggling with terminal cancer that leaves her with only a few weeks and little hope of survival, Eric is a law student far from his family, who in the Big Apple was trying to get a degree and make a career; between one panic attack and another. The backdrop is that of the immense metropolis of New York, from one of the noisiest cities on the entire planet to a sudden and spectral cemetery of skyscrapers where the most deafening silence of all reigns. A silence that instead has all the sound of the loneliness of its two fragile protagonists. Between obvious homages to the Alien saga started by Ridley Scott and very welcome references to the science fiction novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, the prequel written and directed by Michael Sarnoski finds its key identity not so much in the tense action sequences and the frenetic staging of the attacks of the creatures from deep space, but in its (very successful) goal of creating for the big screen a story “offshoot” of the two previous chapters that could work independently.
Without betraying pre-established patterns, winning elements, and international appeal. The final result is a spinoff that chooses to veer its attention more toward the psychology of its two protagonists than toward pure and hard action and terror. For this reason, the deliberate choice to set the very first day of the invasion of aliens sensitive to sound frequencies in New York seems to work very well. Because the noise pollution of one of the largest urban agglomerations in the entire world can be a humanist setting for a tragedy that specifically goes beyond the elements of science fiction and horror (although attractive and exciting); at the center of this post-apocalyptic scenario there are two people, apparently different from each other, fighting their own inner demons and surrounded by the deathly silence of a city that stops uttering words, moving and making noise.
A deafening silence that reflects, and at the same time contradicts, the countryside and suburban world where the Abbots’ family dramas took place in A Quiet Place and (in part) in its 2020 sequel; in Sarnoski’s spinoff, the city of New York is thus transformed into an allegorical theater of a double solitude experienced at a heart-pounding pace and blessed by the almost spiritual guidance of the kitten Frodo, the true emotional glue of a particularly humanist and moving narrative twist. Although far from the revolutionary originality of the cinematic pieces that preceded it, A Quiet Place: Day One nevertheless establishes itself as a model of popular entertainment of great value and balance between staging and content ambitions. The prequel spinoff of the science fiction saga previously directed by John Krasinski confirms for the third time all the intrinsic dynamism of the saga that began in 2018, which here completely changes the setting and protagonists without losing an ounce of its ferocious effectiveness. With a great Lupita Nyong’o and a kitten that steals the scene from everyone and will probably become iconic.
If for a long time we looked at silent films or the absence of sound in cinema, considering it as a narrative, stylistic, and communicative limit, Michael Sarnoski, since the time of his surprising debut Pig, has in all respects been an instant cult, reveals to us how silence is the exact opposite of a communication limit. Because it is precisely in silence that the truth is hidden, that love is hidden and thus the most ferocious instincts of man. A concept further amplified by the excellent work done by Sarnoski for this minor yet interesting third chapter of A Quiet Place: Day One, however, is not exclusively interested in the instincts of violence and ferocity, typical of those who survive in no man’s lands now frighteningly dominated by excruciating silences and streets strewn with bodies and rubble, but also in the sweetest and most childish ones. What is it that you want most when it’s all over? The answer is simple and immediate, what made us feel good at the beginning? Sam and Eric miss music terribly, but pizza even more.
One might spot here an apparent reference to the hilariously unhinged Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) from Zombieland, who despite having survived a new world of the undead, never stops looking for his beloved Twinkies, the ultimate reason for life. As with the metaphysical, surreal, and poetic literature of Murakami, Sarnoski is the smallest and insignificant moments of gaze, suspension, and waiting that deliver the deepest meaning of the film, and it is good for each viewer to draw their own conclusions, perhaps opening up to even more questions, since the answers that remain, doing harm and good at the same time, slowly vanish, among the dust, the shouts, the verses, and the pain. The War of the Worlds by Steven Spielberg is relived, between reflections on fatherhood, the troubled yet very solid and unbreakable relationship between fathers and children and so through the action dimension, here reduced to the bare bones, of an alien aggression destined to cause a real hell on earth, which however will prove incapable of erasing humanity, in its most innocent, frightened, sweet and gentle form.
Michael Sarnoski grasps the message and, just like John Krasinski, manages to never lose his voice – in a new reality of great silences, although distant from the origins of the independent, of the personal film, hidden here in the blockbuster for the general public, which, however, is not entrusted to just any craftsman, or otherwise, to a well-known name on the Hollywood scene, but rather to a young filmmaker and cinephile, with a boundless love for cinema, who perhaps, thanks to it, finds himself – and there finds himself – even within a film like this, so distant from Pig and yet so close. Let yourself go to the silences, let yourself go to the pizzas, to the pain, and to the poetic and supernatural beauty of cats, those who, better and more than any other individuals, prove capable of tracing love and life, the real one, even among the rubble, even in terror. It must also be said that it was not obvious that we would choose to rely on new characters for this prequel. Krasinski could easily have decided to come back together with his wife Emily Blunt and their children’s interpreters to tell more about the Abbott family before and during the invasion.
As anticipated, he instead chose – wisely – to offer a new point of view on the story, relying on new characters who could offer new nuances of humanity’s fear and survival instinct. On one side of her, we therefore find Lupita Nyong’o, sincerely poignant with that expressive look of hers that had earned her the Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. On the other hand, there is Joseph Quinn, who after the exploit obtained with the role of Eddie Munson in the fourth season of Stranger Things here puts himself to the test with a completely different character. It is the two of them – except a few other characters present mainly in the first half hour – who carry forward the story, perhaps more limited than the previous two films (and with some poorly justified sequences), but which finds its opportunities precisely in this simplicity to amaze and generate pathos. Of course, this new look at the alien invasion doesn’t add much, but it undoubtedly allows us to avoid a sense of what has already been seen and offers a new thrilling experience.
A Quiet Place: Day One Review: The Last Words
The prequel spinoff of the sci-fi saga previously directed by John Krasinski confirms the dynamism of the cinematic saga, which here completely changes the setting and protagonists without losing an ounce of its ferocious effectiveness. With a great Lupita Nyong’o and a cat that steals the scene from everyone. A Quiet Place: Day One offers a new point of view on what John Krasinski told in the first two films of this franchise. Even if nothing particularly new is narrated, offering two new characters, a changing context, and meticulous work on the sound, the film offers quality entertainment, providing thrills and emotions. A Quiet Place: Day One works. It works because it takes up and coherently develops the assumptions of the saga of which it is a prequel, but above all because the director Michael Sarnoski develops it with a direct and lucid narrative construction that does not waste time in useless digressions that would have watered down history. It’s just a shame that the idea, so powerful and effective, is now known and doesn’t add anything new, as well as a development of the supporting characters that is only hinted at, but the 99 minutes of the film maintain the tension very well and this is enough to justify the viewing of this new chapter in the saga.
