The days of Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) are numbered. As day by day, hour by hour, her cancer takes over in the quiet hospice where she is staying – and dying – she is invited by her nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff), at the beginning of A Quiet Place: Day One, on a day trip to the theatre in New York City, and wonders aloud if she will even live that long. All that this young one-time poet has left is her personal stereo, her gallows wit and her beloved service cat Frodo – but once she has secured a promise from Reuben to get some real New York pizza while there, she sticks a transdermal pad on her side for pain relief, and gets on the bus.
On this very day, the world will undergo a rapid and overwhelming invasion by alien creatures that are aggressively attracted to noise, and hunt relentlessly for prey. If you have seen John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018), you will already know what, months and years later, the aftermath of this invasion is like, even far from the metropolis’ outer perimeter – and if you have seen Krasinski’s sequel A Quiet Place: Part II (2020), you will already have a good idea of what Day One was like.
Yet writer/director Michael Sarnoski is smart enough to know that we know this, and so he dispenses entirely with exposition, and offers a dazed view from the ground up of a city’s overnight, Cloverfield-style collapse, while focusing on a small set of characters as new to this franchise as he is (with only Djimon Hounson’s face, familiar from the second film, promising hope for the future). The super-fast, sound-senstive monsters themselves, though ever-present, are largely kept to the background, and while they are a real, mass-murdering threat, they also come to embody an encroaching, beleaguering mortality which Sam will eventually, once the initial shock has worn off, insist upon facing on her own terms. Meanwhile Sarnoski carries over the close companionship between human and pet that pervaded his previous feature Pig (2021), and also imports that film’s unconventional path to his characters’ humanity, amplified by genre gestures that are never allowed to dominate.
Where Krasinski’s two sci-fi horrors were family sagas with a strong survivalist bent, here Sam is a single woman whose relatives are all dead, and whose own death was already fast approaching even before any creatures featured – and so, while she is hardly suicidal, survival is not her goal either. One image that encapsulates this difference shows crowds of dazed New Yorkers heading down to the port where they have been told that boats are coming to rescue them while Sam is seen walking through them in the opposite direction, literally going against the mainstream.
Like a tourist in her own trashed home city, Sam totes a bag belatedly emblazoned with the motto “I ❤️ NY”. For she is on a kind of terminal odyssey, longing to fill her final hours with the places and pizza that remind her of her happier childhood, her late father and times past before Day One. On this quest she will be joined by cat-friendly law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) and of course by Frodo himself, in what becomes a nostalgic fellowship. This improbable trio treks across, through and under devastated, defamiliarised skyscrapers, streets and subways, their goal the heady association of smells and flavours that make up the memories of who we are, or once were.
Yet for all its surrealism, the journey undertaken in A Quiet Place: Day One is ultimately affecting too, as the origin story that this prequel’s title promises proves as much an elegiac ending as a new beginning. Still, sometimes in death an unexpected hero is born, and a new day rises, emerging, like Eric when we first see him, dazed but very much alive from the depths. The very fact that Sam, from the outset, has no future is precisely what makes her experiences and her choices resonate with all of us on our various roads towards the inevitability of death. Sarnoski has rolled back his inherited model into a terrifyingly tense, occasionally exhilarating existentialist drama that confronts an individual with the overwhelming and the infinite, and gifts her the grace of finding herself.
A Quiet Place: Day One will be released in cinemas on 27 June 2024. Read our interview with stars Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn here.
