When John Krasinski’s soft-soft-LOUD dystopian horror/thriller first landed in cinemas, audiences found there was plenty to shout about at this tale of a family struggling to survive in a world invaded by vicious, sound-triggered, alien predators. Of course, in the world of A Quiet Place, all that carrying on would have got you torn to frickkin’ pieces – but thankfully all it did in real life was open us up to a fascinating new franchise.
After multiple false starts thanks to an global invasion of an entirely different kind (take a bow, COVID, you bastard), A Quiet Place Part II eventually came along to give us more creeping time with the beleaguered Abbott family and while the surprise factor had dimmed by just a slight amount, it still delivered enough knuckle gnawing stalking scenes to go with countless scenes of legitimate emotion. Well, if A Quiet Plave was a series before, it’s a full blown franchise now as Michael Sarnoski of restrained, porcine-themed revenge thriller, Pig, delivers a prequel/spin-off that attempts to silence the city that never shuts up – *adopts Laslow Cravensworth voice* New York citaaaaaay.
This is Day One.
While we’ve already seen the effects of the first arrival of the gangly-limbed creatures on a small American town during the opening flashback of Part II, we’re about to see what it does to a city that, according to an opening title card, generates enough noise to be the equivalent of a constant, unending scream. Within this unfeasibly deadly scenario, we find Sam, a poet who is fast approaching her the final days thanks to the terminal cancer infestung her body, who finds herself on a field trip to Manhattan when those vicious aliens arrive in a meteor shower.
As you’d expect, dumping a shit-load of aliens whose head is essentially one big ear drum into a city where drivers would rather press their horns than the brake pedal, the chaos is immediate, but after the brutal first wave, Sam and her emotional support cat, Frodo, decide she’s not going to spend the end of the world cowering in silence in some basement. Setting a course for Harlem, she plans to revisit some places from her youth before her cancer, or the rampaging sound monsters, finally brings her down, but along the way, she manages to pick up stray, wide-eyed Brit abroad, Eric, who seems utterly unprepared, emotionally, to last much longer in his own.
As this odd fellowship (hey, the cat’s called Frodo, remember) treks across a ruined city, they attempt to try and find some desperately needed humanity among all this chaos and death; but can Sam and Eric possibly hope to find something that’s surely an impossibility on the midst of an alien invasion – a quiet place to gather some last moments of dignity?
While to many, taking a sharp left into prequel territory may seem like a natural move when trying to open up this world of restricted decibels and death by mauling, I had to admit that when I first heard that A Quiet Place Part III had been put on the back burner in favour of a spin-off, I felt a little sting of panic. I mean, not only had I become extremely invested in the endless trials and tribulations of the Abbott family (damn those abrupt endings!), but Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe must be growing like fucking weeds and unless the third installment involves something of a time jump, surely the next thing that will alert the sound sensitive aliens will be the breaking of Jupe’s voice. However, once I learned that Sarnoski was involved, I immediately felt better as the franchise has always worked best when making you completely and utterly involved in the fate of these hapless survivors.
First: a rather brutal truth. No sequel, no matter how technically superior it may be, can hope to match the surprise of watching the first A Quiet Place, where every creak, crunch, gasp and sign brought pin pricks of tension to your brow, and as a result, the monster parts of Day One have inevitably started to lose some of that early innovation. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have a clutch of set pieces that wont have your guts tied up in knots, but the pattern of the Jurassic Park style stalk sequences has now become slightly easy to predict. The once testicle-shrivelling moment of a sound suddenly breaking the deafening silence just isn’t as devastatingly genital scrunching as it was in 2018 despite the movie unavoidably riffing a lot on 9/11 type imagery much in the same way Cloverfield and the Will Smith I Am Legend did. The original meteor strike rings of War Of The Worlds and repeated shots of shell shocked survivors wandering around in the dust prove to be terrifyingly familiar.
Similarly, some in the audience who aren’t willing g to play along with some of the film’s more stylized moments may unfairly scoff at how eerily well behaved Sam’s cat is as monsters pad around all over the place, or the notion that Pete would hike across a ruined city in order to grab a slice of pizza from a particular parlour. However, those who do are performing something of a disservice both to the film and themselves, because, once the movie wades out into deeper emotional territory, it manages to hit tragic, tear-jerking heights of the original.
While the first movie dealt with the difficulties of raising a family in the wake of the death of a child and the second heaped on the loss in the shape of a fallen patriarch, Day One gives us a heart rending look at mortality from the point of view of someone who is already dangerously close to being on the way out and it proves to be a potent way for the series to continue leeching tears from your ducts as it shoves your face into personal tragedy.
Aiding immensely with this is the central pairing of Lupita Nyong’o as the ailing Sam and Stranger Things breakout Joseph Quinn as the anxiety ridden Eric and their fast tracked relationship contains enough meat and poignancy to measure up to the chemistry of the Abbots. Whether venting their fear through timed screams that are masked by the crashing of thunder strikes or a painfully touching final shot, it’s rare in a horror movie to find that the quiet, character moments end up being more memorable than the scary, screamy bits, but in Sarnoski’s controlled hands, Day One will probably close 2024 out as the most touching horror flick released this year. True, Djimon Hounsou is really only here to be connective tissue with the main series (we sadly already know the fate of Henri) and aside from Alex Wolff’s kindly nurse, no one else aside from Frodo gets a look-in on Nyong’o and Quinn’s blubber inducing double act – but even in the midst of a city wide massacre, it’s the intimate moments that register most.
While some may have preferred we got a continuation rather than a backtrack, Day One still shows that the franchise has some almighty emotional haymakers left in the barrel and if the final shot doesn’t send you out sobbing, then you may need to adjust the volume on your feelings.
The claws of A Quiet Place may have dulled just every so slightly, but its heart beats stronger than ever.
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