Welcome to the New Quiet Place, Same As the Old Quiet Place
Silence is not just golden but rather rare at the multiplex. It can get noisy there, onscreen and off: If it’s possible to tune out an increasingly chatty moviegoing public, that’s only because the movies themselves are often downright deafening in their Dolby cacophony. All of which makes the Quiet Place series a welcome outlier. Following a rural family forced to perpetually hold its tongue lest it be ripped out by some very good listeners, John Krasinski’s 2018 sci-fi suspense contraption brought a refreshing hush to the big screen. Make no mistake, there were piercingly loud moments in the film, as Krasinski rattled nerves with the sudden shrieks and skitters of his extraterrestrial attractions. But these stings of jarring audio followed long stretches of pin-drop quiet — a unique sensory experience that encouraged a different kind of engagement from the audience. With less to hear, we could better sink into the visual storytelling and wordless performances.
A Quiet Place Part II, released into a muted mid-pandemic world three years ago, similarly turned up the thrills by turning down the volume. And that’s more or less the approach of the latest installment in the franchise, A Quiet Place: Day One. This feature-length prologue rewinds to the beginning of the alien invasion that forced a monklike vow of silence upon what remains of humanity. It also shifts the action from a pastoral American heartland to the hustle and bustle of New York City. Nonetheless, the general Quiet Place formula remains intact, for better or worse: Characters tiptoe around, exchanging tense glances while trying to avoid making a peep, lest they summon the spindly predators with the powerful lugholes.
This time around, those characters do not include the Abbotts, the bereaved, vaguely tradcath family we followed in the other movies. (Though he helped come up with the story, Krasinski didn’t write or direct Day One, nor did he add his Office-honed reaction shots to its gallery of terrified faces.) Our new unlucky heroine is terminally ill writer Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), out of the hospital on a day trip to the city when sightless monsters begin falling from the sky. Sam seems awfully spry for someone reaching the end of her hospice care, but no matter: We connect quickly to her emotional journey, because it’s Nyong’o doing the emoting. As in Jordan Peele’s Us, the Oscar winner’s face becomes a grand canvas scrawled with multiple shades of fear.
These movies must be appealing to actors, who can get in touch with their inner Garbo or Falconetti. And so few lines to learn! Around Nyong’o, Day One builds a small ensemble of scared-shitless survivors, whispering and staring between each shrieking attack: a nurse and friend (Alex Wolff) from the hospital; a quick-thinking stranger (Djimon Hounsou, briefly reprising his role from Part II); and most substantially, a British business student (Joseph Quinn) who latches onto Sam, like a baby bird imprinting on his mother. No offense to the humans, but none of these supporting characters are quite as engaging as Sam’s house cat, maybe the most hilariously chill feline in movie history. Never so much as hissing at the beasts snarling and leaping around her, she makes the tabby from Alien look like a total diva.
Specific toothy threat aside, the Quiet Places are basically zombie films, and something about seeing Sam creep through a graveyard New York only underscores that genre lineage. The change in scenery from country to big city allows for some visual variety, a chance to play with the claustrophobia of subway tunnels and crowded boulevards and office buildings whose fragile glass surfaces offer no cover. It also allows Day One’s writer-director, Michael Sarnoski, to indulge in some blatant 9/11 imagery: After the initial attack, Sam stumbles through clouds of smoke and ash, screams ringing out from all directions. Not since another alien-invasion movie, Steven Spielberg’s elemental War of the Worlds, has a blockbuster so deliberately evoked the panic and horror of that day in the Financial District.
Still, the film doesn’t fully exploit its fresh angle, the hook that we’ve been deposited at ground zero of the apocalypse. After the initial asteroid storm, Day One settles too quickly into the same pattern as its predecessors; offering more pantomime than pandemonium, it never quite delivers the fall of civilization promised by its premise. Honestly, Krasinski tackled that concept better in miniature with Part II, which opened with a much more visceral snapshot of the same catastrophic event in the timeline. On a whole, this prequel/spinoff wants for the tighter suspense of those earlier films. Sarnoski, new to blockbuster duty, adjusts quickly enough to the demands of a thriller heavy on digitally conjured creatures. But his set pieces aren’t all that memorable. Perhaps the monsters themselves have lost their novelty. How many times can we watch them tear ferociously into frame?
It’s not so surprising that this filmmaker would be drawn to the moodiness of A Quiet Place more than the action. His Pig confounded expectations; those who went in expecting John Wick with Nicolas Cage and a hog were instead confronted with a melancholy drama about clinging to your values in a world where everything pure can be taken away from you. Here, Sarnoski’s interest seems to lie with the therapeutic arc of the material, built on Sam’s crusade to make it across a ravaged New York to one particular Harlem pizza parlor. In A Quiet Place, Krasinski treated the family’s forced silence as a metaphor for their inability to connect in the wake of tragedy. Day One, by contrast, could be called the story of a poet struggling to articulate her feelings about dying. That’s a potentially poignant idea, but Sarnoski flirts with cliché in exploring it, as when Sam and her new companion use the sonic cover of thunder to indulge in some cathartic, soul-cleansing screaming.
Though Day One is being sold as an expansion of the Quiet Place universe, it is in many ways merely a reiteration. The location swap and shift to a new character doesn’t materially transform what you could now call the formula of the franchise: a mix of silent brooding and special-effects-heavy chase sequences, like a Jurassic Park movie populated by sad mimes. The don’t-speak values of the series, faithfully preserved by Sarnoski and beautifully expressed by Nyong’o, are still welcome in a Hollywood landscape that would prefer to drown audiences in sound. But if you repeat it enough, a bold new approach to multiplex thrills becomes just more noise.