Movies

Go behind the scenes of A Quiet Place: Day One with stars Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn
Featurette: Paramount Pictures

A Quiet Place: Day One
Directed by Michael Sarnoski
Rated PG-13
Silenced 28 June 2024
#AQuietPlace

Day One could actually be any given day in A Quiet Place.

Escape from New York

This isn’t a typical sequel, or prequel. In many respects – but not all – that’s a good thing.

One of those goods things is how this one starts. In a hospice care facility across from Manhattan. Samira (Lupita Nyong’o, Us) is one of the spicier residents. She’s a poet, but her words are venomous as she tears down each and every member of her therapy group. "I’m a mean person," she acknowledges. Mean and more than a little burdened with her health on the decline. There’s some sharp humor in those opening scenes as a couple key characters are introduced.

The group heads into New York City for a play. Actually, a puppet show. It’s a really neat little production as an older man appears on stage, pulls his marionette out of a case and begins to enthrall the audience. The puppet inflates a balloon. The balloon allows the puppet to take flight.

This is the kind of stuff – from the lead-in with Samira in hospice care to the well-executed, magical puppet show – that is actually too good to be sucked into a mild horror story about invading aliens that look like a blend of Demogorgons and Audrey II. There’s a pang of desire to see Samira’s story, those themes continue in a wholly different movie. A mellow drama.

Instead, the puppet’s balloon pops and he comes crashing to the floor. Then all hell breaks loose on the streets of New York.

Stranger Days

An opening title card announces New York City’s noise volume is consistently measured at 90 decibels. That’s the equivalent of a constant scream, or so the card says.

Unfortunately, in a quiet place, no one can hear you scream. Screaming is not allowed.

That’s great. But there’s one really big, glaring problem with Day One. It’s a major cheat that undermines so much of the goodness this surprisingly different sequel has to offer.

This is a wholly new alien invasion. On Day One, nobody (should) know what the heck is going on. Screaming – at this point – is 100% allowed. It’s considered a normal human reaction.

Samira heads outside the theatre to grab a snack. That’s when the invasion hits. There’s (reasonable) pandemonium – including some screaming – on the streets. But, inexplicably, when she finally (after her annihilation makes a few near misses) returns to the theatre – only moments earlier presenting a children’s show to a house full of families with small children, mind you – it’s deafening silence.

Not even a peep of confusion from the little ones?

How in the name of everything that’s holy (and a whole bunch of things that aren’t) did this group of people instantly key in on the need to be quiet? It simply doesn’t stand to reason, even movie reason, to leap to the conclusion in a very loud world and in a particularly very noisy city (remember that title card?) where nobody can stand to be quiet for more than a millisecond that everybody would shut up within a millisecond (or two).

Happiness Falls

What’s sorely missing in this alleged Day One is the mystery. Where’s the Godzilla moment? Those scenes of people asking, What is it? What do we know so far? Who can help us? Where are the bespectacled scientists in white lab coats? Where’s the news media making noise and fanning an atmosphere of fear while disseminating disinformation?

The message is: the aliens have arrived. We’re done for. Role over and play possum.

It’s a narrative whiff that within minutes makes the alien invasion aspect nothing more than business as usual for another 100 minutes in the Quiet Place series.

The creatures are seen communicating with each other. Why doesn’t somebody – maybe a Francois Truffaut type – try to learn their language? An aural equivalent of sign language would be interesting.

What about the rest of the country? What about the rest of the world?

Those elements are where the real Day One story is. How does global society function in a world falling apart? Well, okay, the world is in reality falling apart and society is barely functioning. But what applied to the world post-9/11 and during the COVID pandemic doesn’t really apply here. Ignore all that. This is a fanciful, hyperbolic tale of the world’s downfall that should’ve been told from a much wider vantage point rather than dialing it down to Samira, her omnipresent cat (named Jones; just kidding, it’s called Frodo), an unlikely newfound friend named Eric (Joseph Quinn, Stranger Things) and a quest for pizza.

Patsy’s Pizza and an Angel of Harlem

Pizza?

Yeah. Samira wants to go to Harlem and grab a slice, perhaps the last slice in New York. Quite possibly the last slice of her life. The notion of grabbing some pizza starts as a firm demand made by Samira before she agrees to join the therapy group in their innocent New York adventure.

It’s not as silly as it sounds. It’s actually – under the circumstances – a fairly wise endeavor. It’s a goal. It’s a distraction from the chaos. It’s something positive, hopeful upon which to place her focus and dwindling energy. Besides, the bridges were blown to prevent the aliens from crossing into other boroughs and New Jersey. So, travel’s not easy.

As the horror begins, the pizza motif turns into a bit of a running joke before revealing itself as something with a deeper, more personal significance.

This is director/screenwriter Michael Sarnoski’s second feature, following the well-regarded Pig with Nicolas Cage. Sarnoski gets so many of the human elements right. There are great moments of Samira and Eric timing their primal, stress-releasing screams to thunderclaps. Suitably, water features, like a park fountain, are shown drowning out noises, offering cover for humans to speak softly.

And Nyong’o – who’s created a great, quietly tortured character in Samira – delivers one of the best movie lines this year, "I’d forgotten how the city sings. You can hear it when you’re quiet."

All of that’s great. But Day One needs a more legitimate earth-shattering story to set the stage and tee-up these characters and, ultimately, the Quiet Place series as a whole.

Start with Why (and the Time)

This series also has to contend with a serious alien problem. It’s the lame notion the aliens can’t survive in the water. For the love of M. Night Shyamalan, that narrative minefield was covered in the miserable Signs, wherein aliens seeking world domination (or at least its destruction) targeted a world covered in water even though water proved to be their silver bullet.

Virtually everything about the handling of the alien invasion in Day One warrants a sigh of exasperation. But, again, it’s that human story – the one that seems to belong in a different movie – that keeps things bearable.

At one point, a person’s seen wearing ear-covering headphones while listening to a radio newscast. The person’s writing down an evacuation order; that’s precisely where this episode should’ve been focused. Establish the rules for the invasion (maybe even a little fanciful "why" would be good). Why start with New York City? Is it because the Knicks blew it again?

What’s with the iPods? And the music festival poster dated 1990? Is that modern lower Manhattan? It’s definitely not the Twin Towers. The time is oddly ambiguous.

One of the movie’s marketing posters teases a really crazy idea. It’s a pedestrian crossing traffic light that reads "Don’t Talk" instead of "Don’t Walk." That’s a movie worth investigating. Things should’ve gone wilder in the big city, letting the chills reach a higher level in this metropolitan prequel before the madness heads west. Of course, the mass coordination of communications can’t logistically happen on Day One, when everything is still one massive mystery.

With that mystery nowhere in sight, how about next time we make it wild and go to A Quiet Place: Day One, Year Two?

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.

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