A Quiet Place: Day One - A Prequel That Falls Short
The thrill of a fresh idea has waned, and what are we left with? The latest installment in the A Quiet Place franchise, Day One, attempts to revive the magic of the original, but ultimately falls short. The prequel, directed and co-written by Michael Sarnoski, shifts focus from the Abbott family to a new character, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), who is dying of cancer. She is bitter, sarcastic, and mean, but taking the “save the cat” idea to its literal extreme, Sam does have one friend: A cat named Frodo.
A desolate New York City
The film barely addresses how everyone figures out that they need to be quiet. One moment, people are being devoured in the streets of New York, and several later, there’s a band of survivors pushing their fingers to their lips. Perhaps this was smart: There’s only so much an audience will tolerate watching characters bewildered about something they already know. But it might have been a little interesting to watch someone figure it out, or, like, try to persuade a toddler to buy into it.
“The beauty of A Quiet Place was the silly mystery. We were just dropped into this apocalyptic world with a very simple but challenging rule: If you make a noise, you die. Got it.”
The story itself is quite contained to Sam and Eric, a stranger who kind of attaches himself to her and Frodo. She has one goal: To survive long enough to get to her favorite pizza place in Harlem. There is something compelling about the idea of what a terminal person might do on the first day of the apocalypse, and Nyong’o is powerful and heartbreaking on this quest for the perfect slice.
A slice of hope in a desolate world
However, the film wants to be both a meditative character study and a thrilling horror movie that gives us more monsters, more carnage, more jump scares, and unsettling memories of 9/11. They never quite mesh, and several choices make it seem like the filmmakers were just trying to shoehorn in excitement without much justification. One of the most exciting sequences that captures the terror of Krasinski’s films is when Eric goes to a pharmacy to try to get meds for Sam. It’s simple, efficient, and full of dread and tension because it’s a necessary risk, unlike many of the bigger set pieces that feel more strained.
Ultimately, Day One could have been set around any old apocalypse. Tethering it to the rules of A Quiet Place, a smart premise whose novelty is impossible to recreate, let alone build a world upon, just holds it back.
A Quiet Place: Day One
