A Quiet Place: Day One: Review

Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou
Director: Michael Sarnoski

The latest chapter in the A Quiet Place franchise goes back to the very beginning, moments of which were hinted at during flashbacks in 2020's A Quiet Place Part II.

This time, shorn of any on-screen John Krasinski or Emily Blunt, the film focuses on Lupita Nyong'o's Sam, who finds herself trapped in New York City when the alien invasion begins.

The latest film is penned by Krasinski, so his fingerprints are still all over the storyline and in truth, it's infinitely better than it has any right to be. 

That's largely due to a story that feels like a Tales From The Quiet Place rather than attempting to replicate what has gone before. But it's also seemingly hampered by the fact that it begins with a character in a hospice and an inevitability over how the alien invasion goes and therefore there's a limit on how much stock you'd place on any length of survival.

Yet, surprisingly, the film is quite moving, even if parts of it feel dangerously close to overplaying some of the mystery of how it all began. Abandoning the flashback ethos of the first two, the film follows a linear narrative as it tells the story of Nyong'o's Sam and Joseph Quinn's Eric.

Throwing in a cat as Sam's support animal, the heartstrings are already to be tugged, but wisely by injecting proceedings with some tension and some overt scenes of 9/11 style stragglers and survivors in New York's dust-ridden warzone streets, the film flirts dangerously close to overegging the pudding. (Especially in one sequence which is overt in its religious iconography.)

Yet Nyong'o's dignified, empathetic and restrained turn as survivor Sam makes A Quiet Place: Day One what it is - granted, there needs to be a suspension of disbelief (cats wouldn't be quiet for that long, surely), but anchored by such a lead, the film manages to wipe away any doubt this is a lazy cash-in.

Pig director Sarnoski wisely keeps the creatures largely out of focus as threats (apart from a few scenes which teeter on the edge of B-movie creature feature and lazy jump scares) as he steers this journey of connection and redemption to its conclusion.

It may not quite reach the heights of the first film, but stripped of a need to over-explain proceedings, and thanks to committing to film some imagery of harrowing proportions, this spinoff side story manages to prove that once again, silence is golden.