The Death Angel Invasion Begins with a Bang as Lupita Nyong’o Silently Takes to the Streets of Manhattan in Large-scale Prequel
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL SARNOSKI/2024
Jim Tudor: New York City is many things, but a quiet place is not one of them. Until now, that is. The new, highly anticipated prequel to John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020) not only takes us back to the day the beastly sound-seeking alien creatures known as “death angels” first crashed down on Earth en masse, it does so from a worm’s eye view within The Big Apple. It’s quite the change of setting for the previously woodsy away-from-it-all world of the first two movies.
(A quick caveat…. As of this writing, I still haven’t not seen A Quiet Place Part II. 2020 was a rough year for movie watching for historically obvious reasons. My teenage daughter, though, has since caught up with it. I’ve questioned her about it to a point). A Quiet Place: Day One, a directed by acclaimed Pig (2021) filmmaker Michael Sarnoski (who also shared screenplay and story credits for the new film) is a worthy prequel to its much-loved predecessors, albeit from a very different- and fresh- perspective. I came out of the screening with some questions about the film’s logic and internal rules. Most, though, proved satisfingly answerable. Most, but not all.
Going in, we already have a good sense about A Quiet Place: Day One, as it stars Lupita Nyong’o, who absolutely elevates everything she’s a part of. Nyong’o plays Samira, a terminally ill poet living in a well-intentioned but typically abysmal hospice facility, has already given up on life when we first meet her. She cares for her service cat, Frodo, and clearly laments the life she’s already lost. When the death angel invasion occurs during a group field trip into the big city, she ironically finds motivation to live her life more adventurously than she’s been able to in a long while. While everyone around her is meeting their gruesome demise via the hostile invaders, she takes the opportunity to quest- in total silence, as one must in order to not attract the killer creatures- to her favorite childhood pizza place in Harlem. Just because it’s probably the end of the world doesn’t mean that a few tasty slices might not survive. It’s a questionable motivation to hang a monster movie on, but I’d say it works as well as it needs to.
Erik Yates: Like you, I found the film to be a worthy entry to the series. I did see A Quiet Place Part II, and the opening scene of that 2020 film showed us day one for the small upstate New York town inhabited by the family led by real-life couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. A Quiet Place: Day One, however focuses on Manhattan which we are told in the opening text card operates at a decibel level of 90, the equivalent of a constant scream. For those familiar with what attracts these death angels, you understand that the body count is going to be considerably higher. With this prequel, Paramount attempts to widen the world John Krasinski helped create (including having co-writing credits on this film) with mixed results.
Much of the film moves at a brisk pace, but falls victim of some silly scenarios as it attempts to be bigger. Many of those involve the cute service cat Frodo who appears and disappears in scenes throughout the film. Frodo operates much like the cat in Alien, except this cat has no problem getting wet….multiple times in Day One! Lupita Nyong’o is excellent as always, but even she had to roll her eyes at times when random strangers in New York seem to do ridiculous things like crawl under a car, grab her leg and start yelling “help me!”, which is sure to draw the monsters. Weren’t there hundreds of other people running around the city in the same general area? Why did you have to follow her and yell like that when it’s already been established that you need to be quiet to stay alive?
These quibbles aside, the film does accomplish what it sets out to do, which is widen the scope of the series to the global threat these creates are, that is alluded to in A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place II. I did miss the narrow focus of the first two films that gave it the feel of a more independent horror film rather than a summer blockbuster tentpole film that A Quiet Place Day One clearly seeks to be. Djimon Hounsou brings back his character Henri which appears in A Quiet Place II. We don’t get much more backstory on Henri, but it does provide a thread to the first two films by his appearance. As I left the theater, the natural speculation is a matter of what the next installment will focus on. Will we see more of the invasion of these death angels in cities around the globe? Will we follow Eric’s journey (Joseph Quinn), or will we get back to where we left off in the first two installments and get more resistance to the angels of death in A Quiet Place Part III using what they accomplished in A Quiet Place Part II? I have a feeling that it may be a little of all of the above.
Jim Tudor: Interesting about Djimon Hounsou. He’s one of our finest underutilized screen presences, yet in this case, I’m not sure how I feel about the notion of his character simply turning up in both movies. Seems like an easy device, especially considering the geography. I will, however, reserve final judgement until I get caught up with Part II. In any case, he too tends to elevate whatever film he finds himself in. I say give him the lead of the inevitable A Quiet Place: Day Two and Day Three, or maybe A Quiet Place: Day One: Part II. By then the whole thing may’ve degenerated into an Aliens Space Marines rip-off (see: Jurassic World and several other later action franchise sequels to see how well that works), but at least his character would be qualified to lead the assault.
Thankfully, Day One isn’t quite that much of a contrivance-fest. I do very much agree with you about the silliness of several scenarios. The bit with her under the car was particularly nonsensical, especially considering that once the screaming guy is gone, the car apparently collapses on her foot, pinning her there. Nevertheless, she not only forces her way out but is immediately right back to running around.
I also am trying to understand the film’s preoccupation with performance and whatnot. In one darn day, the jaded Samira is visibly moved by a puppet show and a magic show. Both are weirdly saccharine scenes in an otherwise blunt-edged (though still very mainstream and PG-13) horror movie. I’ve been trying to figure these moments out, and so far, I can’t. Factor in the continuous adventures of Frodo, The Last Cat on Earth, and the whole thing simply seems all the more sillier.
That said, A Quiet Place: Day One ticks along awfully well in its first third, much like the super-effective chaotic initial attack in 1996’s Independence Day. Once the law student Eric literally pops up and becomes important, things begin to skid. I did not care for that character.
Erik Yates: “law student Eric literally pops up”…that is so true. I agree with you about the character. We get very little information about him, other than him being from Kent….England. He also does magic tricks. Why does he attach himself to Samira and Frodo? Do we just believe that the cat has good discernment and is a fantastic judge of character so Eric must be ok? Why was he under water in the first place?
I think that the more you think about this story, the more its going to fall apart under the scrutiny. The good news is that in the moment, this film provides exactly what it promises. We get a large scale experience of the invasion of these death angels in the middle of America’s largest city providing lots of tense moments and a remarkably quiet theater as audience members practice the “silence is golden” ethos of this new dystopia world. We get a chance to see Lupita Nyong’o lead a large scale film and not simply be a part of an ensemble (Black Panther, Star Wars: The Force Awakens). Paramount, on the other hand, gets itself a tent-pole version of the little two A Quiet Place films-that-could, and by calling it “Day One” they get a soft-reboot that allows them to take it in any direction they want. As long as the box office rewards them, they’ll be pushing out many more A Quiet Place films for a long time to come.