Michael Sarnoski sits in the director’s chair for A Quiet Place: Day One and delivers a movie that often feels like an A Quiet Place movie and a Michael Sarnoski film – just not at the same time. The softer moments between Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn are great, but often feel out of place in this larger world.
It was only a matter of time before the post-apocalyptic universe of A Quiet Place introduced audiences to the first days that the aliens who hunt by sound crash-landed to Earth. While the previous two entries were focused on the aftermath – the months and years after that were impacted by societies downfall – A Quiet Place: Day One drops you front and center into New York City as the predators first touch the planet.
And we see these events of Day One through the eyes of a terminally ill patient named Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), who’s already faced many of life’s toughest battles before ever coming face-to-face with one of these creatures. Her fight for survival only gets harder and harder with the events that take place in A Quiet Place: Day One, and she quietly wanders the dusty, cloudy streets of NYC to remember many of her life’s fainting positive memories – those of her dad, her childhood, and her incredibly well-behaved cat Frodo.
While wandering the desolate areas of New York City’s inoperable subway stations, she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn). Eric is similarly and understandably distraught by the terror of Day One‘s events, and the two quickly strike a friendship and find solace in one another. The highlight of A Quiet Place: Day One is easily the connection and chemistry that Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn have together. It’s not necessarily a romantic relationship, but it quickly becomes intimate and personal, as if they’ve known eachother for years instead of just hours.
The rest of cast is quite slim. Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou make fleeting appearances, but neither have the screen time to command your attention. It’s essentially a two-hander by Nyong’o and Quinn for a large majority of the runtime. You spend enough time with these two characters to feel as though you know many of the intricacies of the personalities and life experiences.
A Quiet Place: Day One is directed by Michael Sarnoski, who broke onto the scene in mighty fashion in 2021 with his similarly somber and grim Pig – a movie I liked quite a bit and, at the very least, showed Sarnoski understood the smaller elements and moments in a film that eventually build into the bigger ones. Pig is so quiet and soft-spoken that he felt like the perfect director to make that next leap into a franchise film like this.
And yet, Day One didn’t really stick with me in a way that I’d hoped it would. The dilapidated, crumbling world of NYC feels so real and authentic, but paired with the frequent wash-rinse-repeat scares that the A Quiet Place world has relied on now for three entries, it felt odd mixed together. It looks and feels like a Sarnoski film, and it also looks and feels like an A Quiet Place film – but not often at the same time.
The movie is one of the clunkier director-franchise pairings I’ve seen in a while considering how much it feels like a great fit on paper. Like I mentioned earlier, the smaller moments work at an extremely high clip, but Day One is constantly trying to remind you that it’s ultimately a franchise creature feature with supposedly invigorating thrills.
I’ll try to give A Quiet Place: Day One a few more re-watches in the future because I really want to like this movie. It’s a perfectly feasible B-movie that boasts two great central performances, but the recycled material and missed opportunities provided a viewing experience that was much more frustrating than it was rewarding.
Rating: 2.5/5
Genre: Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller
Watch A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) on Paramount+ and VOD
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