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One of the odd things about A Quiet Place: Day One is that we’ve already seen that first day. The original movie from 2018 starts on “Day 89” and moves forward in fits and starts from there. The sequel, released in 2021 after a year-long pandemic delay, takes us even further ahead.
But that second movie also includes a flashback to the day the aliens arrived, an introduction to these weird, spindly creatures who seem to be both attracted to noise and annoyed by it. Why else do they attack anyone who dares make a sound above a whisper? They’re like rabid extra-terrestrial librarians.
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With the aliens and their strengths and weaknesses already known from the earlier films, the stakes in this one, set on the island of Manhattan, could not be lower. It could have been called A Quiet Place: Quest for Pizza.
And yet it’s still a worthwhile watch, thanks in large part to its two main characters, played by Lupita Nyong’o and a pair of cats named Nico and Schnitzel. Apologies to human costar Joseph Quinn as Eric, an out-of-town stranger who tags along with Nyong’o’s cynical New Yorker. He feels like an afterthought, and he acts like one too.
We first meet Samira (Nyong’o) in hospice care, reading profanity-laced poetry to her fellow cancer patients. She’s such an interesting character, angry and vulnerable and vibrant and wound tight as hospital corners, that we’d be invested in her story even if it didn’t involve an alien invasion and the end of the world.
In fact, one of her first activities is merely to attend a marionette performance, where she is first moved, then embarrassed at having been moved by the simple story. But then mayhem arrives from above, and pretty soon everyone is either quiet or dead. (Or both.) There’s a wonderful/terrible moment when Samira witnesses a death and, unable to make a sound, ends up looking like the model for Munch’s The Scream.
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Her cat, meanwhile, has to be one of the most fantastic fictional filmic felines since Jonesy, the ginger tabby in Alien. Sympathetic, intelligent and (crucially) quiet, Frodo the cat is introduced as Samira’s emotional support animal, a role he ably fulfills and then some. I feared for his safety as much as I did for the humans in the film.
Director Michael Sarnoski — he cowrote and directed 2021’s Pig, starring Nicolas Cage — nicely balances the film’s jump-scare moments with its (ahem) quieter, more emotional beats, such as when Samira visits a bar in Harlem that has a special place in her life. (This is also a rare scene in which Quinn’s character gets to shine.)
Day One also features some fine sound design, particularly the alien marauders, whose stomping gait sounds like the noise Clydesdales would make if they were being ridden by elephants.
Though it must be said that the movie misses a few opportunities. Samira is a poet, Quinn a law student, and yet they never visit the New York Public Library? I can’t imagine a better place to be told: Shhh!
But it turns out that most of Day One was filmed in London, with a soundstage doubling as New York City. A little Googling also reveals that John Krasinski, writer and director of the first two Quiet Place movies, also has plans for a third, presumably set after the first two.
Think of this one then as an odd Quiet Place backwater, something to keep us invested in the franchise until the next chapter arrives. It’s due sometime next year but, befitting the story’s style, it’ll probably sneak up on us.
A Quiet Place: Day One opens June 28 in cinemas.
3 stars out of 5
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