A Quiet Place: Day One Review
“It’s good to have been back” – Samira
Back in April 2018, I was pretty impressed with A Quiet Place, and this was reflected in my review, published on my previous site (available on this link, thanks to the Internet Archive.) But I finished my review with this line; “Overall, completely satisfying and unlike any film we’ve seen before. I’ll go on record though and say that the worst thing that could happen, in my opinion, is for this concept to become a franchise. We don’t need a sequel, though I fully expect one.”
Well, we got the inevitable sequel (the review to that one is here) and it progressed the story, leaving the ending open for a trilogy. Okay – a trilogy isn’t quite a franchise, as long as the studio leave it at that, and we just concern ourselves with the plight of the beleaguered family we’ve followed since the beginning. But while we wait for the third instalment, a prequel hits our screens. Sadly, A Quiet Place: Day One really is pushing the concept to franchise territory.
It's a prequel we don’t need, with a cast of characters we don’t know. And it demonstrates the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The strength of A Quiet Place was that it’s that rarity, a film without dialogue. Due to the plot involving humans being hunted and preyed upon by an invading race of (presumably) aliens who are ultra-sensitive to sound, the fact that 99% of the film was silent and any sound a shock, was a novelty. Adding to this was that we only got snatches of a brief glimpse at the creatures, so we didn’t really get much of an idea what they looked like, we have no idea where they came from – another planet? Another dimension? All we knew was what we saw on the covers of discarded newspapers, and the location of the film was rural, with a sparse population. (It played even more effectively after the Covid lockdowns, I discovered.)
Day One diluted all this as far as I’m concerned. As the title implies, we’re now at the day they arrived and caused mayhem and havoc world-wide. The film is set in New York, and carries a 9-11 sense of panic and confusion as the city is suddenly bombarded. The population is bewildered and terrified, thus noisy and easy pickings for the alien hordes. Now for reasons I can’t really fathom, the military destroys all bridges to Manhattan, which makes no sense to me as the aliens are invading the whole planet. So, what gain could there be in isolating Manhattan?
In the midst of all this turmoil is Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), who is suffering a terminal illness. As she hasn’t long to live, she decides that rather than try to escape the island, she’s going to a place she remembers from her childhood, a particular pizzeria. (So, effectively, you could summarise the film as “Woman wants pizza during alien invasion” and it’d be pretty accurate.) She has a cat, and the cat is disturbingly calm during the explosions and the couple of dives into bodies of water. This leads me to believe that either the cat was stoned out of its tiny feline mind, or it’s a CGI cat – because I sure as hell have NEVER seen a cat that calm and placid. Samira also has a companion she picks up along the way, a man named Eric (Joseph Quinn) who has little to do, other than follow her around like a stray puppy.
It may well be that I was suffering screen fatigue, this was the third film in a triple bill we did, but I found the film to be on the slow side. Quiet Place films tend to be a little slow, which makes sense, because the characters HAVE to move slowly for fear of making a noise and getting themselves eaten, plus of course, it adds to the rising tension. I was disappointed to be following this odd couple through what was left of Manhattan, and as they seemed to be moving slowly, oh soooooo slowly through every dark space they could find, with their mellow, laid-back cat in search of pizza, time seemed to stop.
Samira’s story, and the fact she feels she wants to die on her own terms rather than succumb to the whim of her illness is sensitively told, and Lupita Nyong’o puts in a superb performance, and that’s given the film an overall boost. It’s a film I want to see again, and I have no doubt it’ll benefit from being seen on Blu-ray, which tends to give a brightness and contrast we miss out on cinema screens during the dark sequences. I noticed this particularly when I saw Imaginary on blu a couple of days ago.
But as I said, the novelty of having these movies without dialogue is wearing thin due to the well being visited too often.
I'll leave you with the cat staring at you. It gets hypnotic after a while.
Rob Rating = 5
