That Darned Cat!

Two-thirds of the way through a planned trilogy may seem like an odd time to take a sidestep into prequel territory, but that’s what A Quiet Place: Day One seems to be offering us. Relocating the action from upstate New York to the heart of Manhattan, it shows us how the city that never sleeps and, let’s be honest, never shuts up fares when an apocalypse of armour-plated aliens who hunt by sound falls from the sky.

The film follows Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminal cancer patient visiting the city on a day trip, who finds herself trapped when disaster strikes. Separated from her fellow survivors, she encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn), an English law student who survived the initial assault in a flooded subway. Together, the two—along with Sam’s service cat, Frodo—must navigate the quietened streets of New York City in search of safety.

As with A Quiet Place Part II, the risk for A Quiet Place: Day One is that there’s not really that much more you can do with this premise apart from lining up a brand-new set of characters to feed to the creatures. And while this prequel doesn’t seem to add anything at all to the lore of the creatures or the world which they’ll radically reshape, it does at least give us a character with a unique response to and motivation in the face of the alien apocalypse.

Lupita Nyong’o’s Samira is a wonderful creation, almost unique in the annals of disaster movies. There’s a fresh sense of perspective to the end of the world when seen through the eyes of a character whose motivation isn’t survival—her condition makes that moot. Instead, Sam is seeking reconnection, a last embrace of a life long since passed, a sense of closure in the form of a slice of New York pizza from Harlem’s famous Patsy’s Pizzeria. Her being a poet elevates the events, lending them a lyrical poignancy as she weaves a rhythm and rhyme through the film, drawing connections and beauty from the mundane objects around her and giving her every glance and utterance and action meaning and a significance that only belatedly reveals itself. There’s a deep romance to the connection she develops with Joseph Quinn’s Eric that rises above the petty distractions of superficial attraction and finds its expression in a deep, platonic interdependence as he helps her achieve the closure she needs and she, in turn, rekindles a faith in him that he can and will survive.

Director Michael Sarnoski does a solid job of ticking off the familiar tropes from the franchise, judiciously using—without ever overusing—jump scares and other tricks of the trade to keep the tension levels high. However, by allowing his cast to lean into their characters’ unique qualities during the quieter moments, he manages to make the human drama the centrepiece of the monster mayhem.

Apart from giving us, in passing, the origin story of Djimon Hounsou’s character from A Quiet Place Part II, A Quiet Place: Day One doesn’t leave us any the wiser as to the nature or ultimate destiny of the alien invaders who define the story. However, it does give us a fascinating and absorbing glimpse into the lives of characters you’ll genuinely come to care about, their fleeting nature in the larger canvas making them precious rather than superfluous. It’s not essential viewing, but it is rewarding viewing thanks to Nyong’o and Quinn, and maybe as the world ends around us, that’s enough.