A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE (2024)

Studio:   Paramount/Platinum Dunes
Director: Michael Sarnoski
Writer:   Michael Sarnoski, John Krasinski
Producer: Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller, John Krasinski
Stars:    Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou

Review Score:

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Summary:

A terminally ill poet and a lonely law student form an unexpected bond amid a sudden invasion of deadly creatures attracted to sound.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Reuben, a kind nurse at Little Firs Hospice Center, arranges a bus outing into New York City for his patients. Lured by the promise of pizza, Samira, a despondent poet suffering from a terminal illness, reluctantly agrees to join with her cat Frodo.

Samira is disappointed to discover Reuben brought their group to a marionette show. Following the performance by puppeteer Marvin Monroe, the city erupts in chaos when alien creatures attracted to loud sounds suddenly descend to the surface in droves for a rampage of death and destruction. As military planes destroy landmark bridges to futilely prevent the monsters from covering more ground, Samira and Reuben seek shelter in the theater along with other survivors including Henri, a father forced to break a man's neck due to his fearful screaming.

Using pen and paper to avoid making noise, Samira tells Reuben she will still travel to Harlem to get pizza. Reuben realizes Samira intends to die just before a creature kills him.

Samira ventures into the ruined city alone. Since the alien invaders cannot swim, an evacuation order advises survivors to seek safety on water. After a series of encounters with other survivors and attacking creatures, Samira's cat Frodo leads an expat law student named Eric back to Samira.

Despite her insistence on remaining alone, Eric follows Samira back to her apartment where she uses the cover of rain and lightning to look for medication and personal items. Samira expresses her desire to go to Harlem for a slice of pizza from a shop named Patsy's. Alone in New York because his family is in England, Eric asks to go with her.

Samira sneaks out alone the next morning. Eric still catches up to her. Samira inadvertently knocks over books that attract monsters. Eric and Samira flee into a building and through a flooded sewer before ultimately emerging in a ruined church.

With Samira's physical condition worsening, Eric goes back into the city with Frodo to retrieve Samira's medication from an abandoned pharmacy. Eric and the cat avoid more monsters on their way back to Samira. Samira reveals her deceased father used to regularly take her to a jazz club and then for pizza at Patsy's, which is why she wants to return there once more. Bonding over their appreciation of piano music as well as their loneliness, Eric vows to get Samira her pizza.

Eric and Samira make it to Patsy's only to find the building burned out. Eric comforts Samira by taking her to the jazz club and then retrieving pizza from a different restaurant. Eric also entertains Samira with a card trick and Samira gives Eric her sweater as their friendship continues to grow.

Samira and Eric emerge from the club to see a refugee ship on the water in the distance. Intentionally sacrificing herself due to her impending death, Samira distracts attacking creatures with loud noises so Eric can escape to the ship with Frodo. Spotting the commotion on shore, Henri, whom Samira briefly met at the theater, shouts for the boat to stop. Eric makes it on board safely. In the sweater pocket, Eric finds a letter from Samira asking him to care for Frodo and thanking Eric for bringing her back home.

Samira returns to the jazz club to reminisce before going out into the city one last time. Resigned to death, Samira intentionally removes the earphones from her boom box to play her music loudly. A creature quickly drops behind Samira.

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Review:

With this prequel being the third film in the franchise, the "Quiet Place" universe should be trodden territory for returning viewers. So should New York, possibly the most recognizable American city even for people who have never been there in person. And yet, amid all this familiarity, writer/director Michael Sarnoski paints "A Quiet Place: Day One" with fresh strokes of creativity to retain the first two films' narrowed lens on small-scope personal drama while still expanding the setting from a rural countryside to a sprawling urban landscape.

Lupita Nyong'o's lead character gets established with efficiency, and without the use of routine expositional dialogue. A poet whose terminal cancer landed her in a hospice that feels like an unfair prison filled with senior citizen inmates, Samira expresses despondency in group therapy with a mischievous poem about "sh*t." As in, she feels like it, and other patients smell like it. Samira clearly has a crusty personality, yet there's a touch of playfulness to tell us her attitude has been shaped by circumstances, not by an irredeemable flaw or unearned ego.

Samira has also resigned herself to dying. With a short runtime to work with, and a premise necessitating long stretches of silence, this role requires an actor of Nyong'o's caliber and charisma because so much of her story has to be quickly conveyed with looks and body language. Nyong'o organically gets an agreeable audience on board early, rocking a teeter-totter between sympathy and sarcasm without having to move her mouth much.

Lured by the promise of pizza, Samira reluctantly agrees to go on a group outing led by kindly nurse Reuben, a 12-step type who tolerates Samira's sulking with the hope he'll eventually help her regain her heart. Reuben, and by association "A Quiet Place: Day One," could have taken everyone on a typically New York-ian trip, someplace like Times Square or a Broadway musical. In one example of the film detouring toward an unexpected direction, his bus instead drops us off at a marionette show. When's the last time you've seen that in a movie outside of "Being John Malkovich?"

Samira doesn't expect it either. She's further disappointed when she finds out they also won't be going for pizza due to the sudden descent of fiery streaks from the sky, and subsequent assault of death and destruction from deadly monsters drawn to loud noises. Evacuation orders are announced. Military jets obliterate landmark bridges. Then bodies begin dropping all around Samira as she realizes she's now as physically alone as she's felt mentally since her illness.

By virtue of the movie's title, the characters should have to learn the "rules" of dealing with this "new" threat, e.g. don't make distracting sounds, stay near water since the creatures can't swim, etc. Although it's Samira's first time in this situation, it's the third time for the rest of us. Understanding the audience already has this information, Sarnoski doesn't waste time getting the people onscreen up to the same speed as those seated at home. With a fade out and fade in when Samira momentarily loses consciousness, we safely assume word spread quickly during the blackness in between. Zombie movies often take place in worlds where zombie movies don't exist, thus their characters have to gradually learn about shooting the undead in the head and euthanizing anyone who ends up bitten. Even though this film takes place on the first day of the alien invasion, "A Quiet Place: Day One" doesn't similarly force a yawning audience to roll two fingers forward.

Following a series of encounters with fellow survivors fighting through hungry fangs, Samira meets Eric, or rather, Samira's cat Frodo leads Eric to her. An expat law school student whose family lives overseas, Eric empathizes with Samira's loneliness, so he starts following her not unlike a stray pet himself. "A Quiet Place: Day One" is already in full stride when this happens, but it's during the development of Samira and Eric's bond that the movie hits its most humanistic highs.

What begins as an introspective arc of an emotionally devastated person journeying across a ruined city to possibly rediscover her will to live becomes a broader story about connecting with others. Samira and Eric aren't magnetic opposites. They're just people from different walks of life who wouldn't otherwise have a reason to notice one another if not for catastrophic chaos forcing them to form a platonic friendship; a friendship meant to remind us that similarities matter more than differences when we're united by common causes that can bring out the best in our behavior, which is what happens here.

Maybe that's not the most welcome news to anyone anticipating the more visceral thrills of a traditional fright film. Looking at that glass as half-full with gripping drama rather than half-empty with monster mayhem, one could argue there are only so many times we can watch wide-eyed people creeping past creatures with hands held over their mouths anyway. Among its limited "horror," "A Quiet Place: Day One" may even have one such scene too many, but Sarnoski is smart to reduce the runtime to under 90 minutes so redundancy doesn't drag it into dullness.

"A Quiet Place: Day One" also doesn't advance the ongoing mythology much, if at all, aside from a small part for Djimon Hounsou that peripherally links him to the later storyline. However, if you take the film as an average outing within the larger "Quiet Place" world, then a nearly unrecognizable Alex Wolff, and a teary-eyed performance from Joseph Quinn that makes Eddie from "Stranger Things" a distant memory, will join Lupita Nyong'o in forming a fine creature feature whose human element infuses more emotion than most other genre features out there.

Review Score: 80

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