Let’s Talk About the Boldly Fatalistic Ending of A Quiet Place: Day One
In one respect, A Quiet Place: Day One plays it safe. Though it transports the series to a new metropolitan location and flashes back to an earlier time, this prequel/spinoff doesn’t stray far from the blueprint of its predecessors, a pair of unusually muted creature features directed by John Krasinski. We get more scenes of characters creeping across a ravaged post-invasion America, eyes wide and mouths tightly shut. We also get more blatantly Spielbergian special effects sequences — the digitally achieved spectacle of raptor-like monsters pouncing into frame and shattering the tense silence. In general approach, Day One sticks close to the Quiet Place formula, which is probably why it feels a little redundant, but also why it’s making good money.
Of course, “safe” is a relative distinction in the risk-averse arena of blockbuster moviemaking. If the novelty of Krasinski’s premise has waned through repetition, its uncommon minimalism scarcely has; we’re still talking about Hollywood movies with very little dialogue. They’re also pretty downbeat as far as multiplex thrill rides go. The first Quiet Place opened with the death of a toddler — the familial loss that hangs over its family of wearied, mandatorily taciturn survivors. And Day One is arguably grimmer still, even beyond the way its scenes of chaos and billowing ash in New York City evoke the events of September 11th. The most daring thing about the film might be the fact that it follows a character whose fate is effectively sealed from the start.
That would be our heroine, Sam, a terminally ill poet played by Lupita Nyong’o. The opening scenes of Day One make it clear that she’s dying, even as they remain vague on the official diagnosis and prognosis: Though Sam has moved out of her NYC apartment and into a suburban hospice care facility, she’s still pretty sturdy and mobile. Nonetheless, the movie never once teases us with the possibility that she might pull through. Sam has no delusions either about her chances. So it’s no wonder that she’s a bit more sanguine and less panicked than the rest of New York when — during a final field trip to the city — the sky begins falling, bringing a blind, toothy, and ferocious force of annihilation with it. What’s the end of the world to someone already facing down their own private, unavoidable apocalypse?
Day One follows through on the fatalism of this setup. Like, all the way through. At no point does Sam flirt with thoughts of a new beginning in the aftermath of the old world. Well past the denial stage of her grief, she declines to participate in an emergency evacuation plan made by the others, rejecting the kind of safe haven characters in post-apocalyptic dramas will often seek. Instead, she sets out on foot for a particular Harlem pizza parlor — a location whose significance will be revealed in a later speech.
All of this leads to the film’s ending, which is about as soberingly final as you might expect from a prequel. Having found some parting purpose in helping a new companion — Joseph Quinn’s tagalog stranger Eric — reach the proverbial lifeboats, Sam makes one last decision. The closing shot is of her in close-up, headphones on, listening to Nina Simone’s triumphant anthem of liberation, “Feeling Good.” Eyes locked on us, faint smile on her face, Sam unplugs the headphones, flooding a deserted New York with sound. One of the creatures then drops into sight behind her. While the original Quiet Place found Krasinski’s character sacrificing himself to save his children, Sam’s own act 0f self-destruction is more a conclusive expression of autonomy. At the end of her life, she chooses when and how she dies. That’s a relatively bold choice for a four-quadrant multiplex seat filler. It’s not too many films of this budget that build to a victorious act of euthanasia.
There’s a certain logic to building a Quiet Place prequel around an inherently doomed character. It puts a personal spin on the inevitability of the material; Sam’s awareness that the end is nigh mirrors the audience’s knowledge of where the larger story is headed, the only place it can go. It emphasizes the fatalism inherent to all origin stories, which move in only one direction, down a path paved in stone by earlier stories. Sam can no more stop what’s coming for her than Day One can change the trajectory of its franchise.
More than that, putting the main character on borrowed time scrambles the stakes of a fallen-world thriller. With the ultimate matter of survival resolved, her physical journey plainly becomes an emotional journey, a plight for some form of closure before cancer or a space reptile takes her out. In that respect, what’s happening in the plot becomes less important than the shifting feelings passing across Nyong’o’s animated features — a spectrum that reaches from anger to fear to something like a sense of doomsday relief.
Of course, the first Quiet Place had its own therapeutic arc: It was the cathartic saga of a broken family piecing itself back together after unspeakable tragedy. But that was mostly subtext, an interior tension underlying the exterior conflict; the urgent matter of escaping beasts with supersonic hearing was what drove the movie. In Day One, it’s not so much life or death as the passage from one to the other that counts. Writer-director Michael Sarnoski doesn’t downplay the alien threat, but he does minimize its ultimate importance: Because Sam is on her last legs either way, the movie becomes about how she’ll spend her remaining days. Again, it’s a surprisingly gutsy move, building a summer blockbuster around a character resigned to death all along… though what else might one expect from Sarnoski, whose Pig similarly subverted genre expectations, twisting the outline of a revenge thriller into something more melancholy and philosophical?
Make no mistake, Day One is a run-and-hide monster movie, just like the other Quiet Place films. It does not totally transcend its function as an exploitation of intellectual property that’s yet to be milked dry. But by removing the element of hope (or at least hope that Sam will see any kind of future), Sarnoski twists the tropes of the series into a story of mortality and acceptance. It’s about one character making her peace with what’s coming, letting go of any bitterness about it, and dying on her own terms. And maybe that alone makes this a Quiet Place worth visiting.
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