A Quiet Place: Day One review

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE: 

SOLID HORROR PREQUEL WITH PLENTY OF SCARES! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: *** out of 4

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn in A Quiet Place: Day One

 

            Those alien monsters that really hate sound are back and this time they’re going back to the very beginning in A Quiet Place: Day One, the latest installment of the Quiet Place film series and a prequel/spin-off set before the events of the first movie. This marks the first film in the series not to be directed by John Krasinski though he serves as a producer alongside Michael Bay and is given a story credit with Michael Sarnoski (Pig) as the director. 

            I loved the previous Quiet Place movies (First one is still my favorite) so obviously I wasn’t going to miss this prequel that showed the events that led up to the world going quiet. However, we already got a glimpse of day one at the beginning of A Quiet Place: Part II, but I was still interested in seeing a more fleshed out origin that could also shed some light on the franchise’s lore. 

            Upon seeing it, I definitely got a little more lore out of it compared to the earlier entries, but it’s mostly just another Quiet Place movie except without Emily Blunt and her children. It is still a Quiet Place movie done well and the suspenseful scenes are very effective, but as a prequel it kind of left me wanting more. 

            The film follows Samira or Sam (Lupita Nyong’o-12 Years a Slave, Black Panther 1 and 2, Us), a terminally ill cancer patient living in a hospice in New York City with her service cat, Frodo (Which she totally named after Harry Potter!). However, meteor-like objects suddenly fall from the sky and crash into the city thus releasing hostile extraterrestrial creatures that attack anything and anyone that makes a sound. 

            So, the race is on as Sam and an English law student named Eric (Joseph Quinn-Dickensian, Overlord,Gladiator II) who accompanies her must survive the horrific invasion and find a way out of the city without making a single noise. 

            The film also stars Alex Wolff (Jumanji 2 and 3, Hereditary, Oppenheimer) as Reuben and Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Gran Turismo) reprising his role from A Quiet Place: Part II as Henri “The Man on Island”. 

            Overall, A Quiet Place: Day One gives what it promises, a movie that chronicles the events leading up to the first film and shows exactly what happened when the alien monsters crash landed. For the most part it’s done well and retains a lot of what made the earlier entries so chilling though I felt the story could have gone beyond what we got.

            Like maybe you could have shown the creatures’ home planet and what led them to Earth, we already saw in the second movie that they crash landed from space so why not expand on that a little more? I’m not saying this is a bad movie and that the story isn’t engaging, far from it, I just felt there were some missed opportunities to flesh the franchise’s plot out further. 

            I also thought it was odd that people caught on pretty quickly that they need to be quiet in order to survive. It seemed like right after Lupita had woken up from being knocked unconscious during the monsters’ first attack everyone in the city already figured out how to survive and now we’re just watching another Quiet Place movie. 

            I think it would have been stronger paced to show the city in anarchy and panic and over the course of the movie realizing the key to survival is to remain silent. This just felt kind of rushed to me and needed more buildup. 

            Personal nitpicks aside, there’s a lot I really enjoyed about this movie first off, Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn as the leads. I thought they were great together and had very strong chemistry, I like the dynamic they have as they fight to survive and I wanted to see them prevail. 

            Actually, the fact Nyong’o’s character is a terminally ill cancer patient, it makes an interesting contrast with the rest of the surviving citizens that are now realizing that today might be their last day alive because of the hostile creatures attacking while she’s been thinking about it and possibly even accepting that fate before day one even begun. Just a very thought-provoking character detail that’s worth pointing out among plenty of other human moments between her and Quinn. 

            The scares and chases are very effective and get your anxiety pumping with probably the best sequence being Lupita and Joseph running from the creatures and them breaking car windows to activate the car alarms in order to distract them while they make their escape is a brilliant strategy and exhilarating sequence. Another scene I enjoyed was this moment where they needed to kick down an apartment door during a thunderstorm and they have to kick it as the thunder clashes so they don’t alert the monsters. 

            I can’t say this is a great Quiet Place movie because I thought the previous two movies were better told and paced, but I still think A Quiet Place: Day One is a welcome addition to the franchise. If you enjoyed the earlier films, I can’t see you not getting anything out of this movie though your opinion on it may vary, for me, a good Quiet Placemovie is good enough.