The first “A Quiet Place” movie worked well for a few reasons: a touching, tragic family story, some solid performances, and a central intrigue: why do they have to be so quiet? Now, two installments later, we have a prequel. So we’ll find out where these monsters we meet in the first two films came from and what they want, right?... Right? Oh. Ok then. Well, at least there’s a cute cat.
To be fair, “A Quiet Place: Day One” also retains a couple of the other critical elements that led to the other movies' success. What’s nice about this series, and why they’ve generally been well received, is that, just as much as it’s about sinewy wall-climbing sound-sensitive gazelle monsters, it’s about humans being mostly sweet to each other. Obviously, being a prequel to two other horror movies, this movie doesn’t end with the good guys winning. But sometimes it’s not about vanquishing an enemy; it’s about doing your best to be a good human when times are tough.
It doesn’t get much tougher than the situation Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is in. Despite only being in her 20s or 30s, she’s spending her last remaining days in suburban hospice care, suffering with a terminal illness and not exactly digging her surroundings. That’s why, when a chance to visit her former home of New York City to see a show and get some pizza afterward arises, she gets on the bus. Unfortunately, it’s not a great day to be in New York City, because alien monsters will rain from the sky, effectively ending the world as we know it.
Like everyone else, Sam tries to survive the invasion, quickly learning that staying quiet is the way to do so. After the initial shock, though, she diverges from everyone else and finds herself preoccupied with her original goal: acquiring pizza—specifically pizza from Harlem. Along the way, a strange, wide-eyed British man has what seems to be a spiritual encounter with her cat and starts following them around in a lost-puppy sort of way. Together, the trio heads north to Harlem on their pizza quest, while helicopters urge people south to catch a ferry.
The new angle the writers take for this prequel is what makes it interesting: what happens at the end of the world for someone without much time left anyway? In the films prior, the characters had a lot to live for, and we saw their survival instincts really take over. Sam, in contrast, seems unmoored from survival instincts and motivated by something else—the mystery of the film being what that is, exactly. It can’t be just pizza. (I mean…maybe it can? But I don’t think the characters have smoked enough weed for that.)
Where this film falters a bit is outside of the main character’s journey. The behavior of her new petrified British friend (Joseph Quinn, whom you may recognize as Eddie Munson from Stranger Things), for example, doesn’t seem to align with what we know about him; we establish right away that he is terrified of dying, and yet, instead of following the escape-minded crowd to South Street Seaport, he follows Sam and her cat uptown. On top of that, the alien monsters’ motivations also remain unexplained. There’s a note at the film’s opening—something about how New York City’s average noise level is 85 decibels, “the same as a human scream.” So, is the implication that the sound-sensitive aliens were cruising along in space, heard the taxis honking and decided to kill us? Seems unlikely, and, unless there’s another prequel in the works, we’ll never know how they found us or what they want or how they build spaceships without thumbs or eyes.
From start to finish, this is Nyong’o’s movie. Her performance carries everything forward–her misery at the unfairness of life, her hope, her determination, her frustration, and her sacrifice. Everything conveyed by this film goes through her. Quinn, as her compatriot here, is also solid, but his character is mostly just a person for Sam to interact with—not fully developed, but through no fault of the actor.
Was this a satisfying origin story of the “Quiet Place” universe? It was not. But it was a passable story in and of itself, and extremely well played by Nyong’o. It still has the heart that made the first entry stand out and enough suspense to have audiences gripping their armrests and silently urging the folks on screen to not breathe so loud. Also, it has the aforementioned cute cat, which is enough by itself for certain people (me) to see it. Maybe the next one will have a dog? But something tells me that wouldn’t go so well.
