I’ll be blunt: if you didn’t enjoy A Quiet Place as much as everybody else who raved about it in 2018 or were underwhelmed by its sequel A Quiet Place Part II, this review is for you. And this review says you should see A Quiet Place: Day One, because in my eyes it is as close to a perfect installment as I’m expecting to get out of this franchise. Which, granted, sounds melodramatic, but stay with me.
A Quick Catch-up for A Quiet Place: Day One
If you haven’t caught up with what these films are about: nigh indestructible apex predator aliens drop from space. The good news is they’re blind and have no sense of smell; the bad news is, they have an incredible sense of hearing, and rip apart anything and everything that makes noise to shreds. A Quiet Place: Day One shows us the beginning of their attack on planet Earth, and follows New York native Sam, who returns to the city on the worst day possible as the creatures touch down. This film, of course, serves as a prequel to the other two films that came before it, but outside of one character we’ve seen before, Day One is a self-contained story, and I prefer it that way.
A Setting You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Personally, this film is what I wanted from the jump. One of the problems I had with A Quiet Place was its greatest strength: its insistence on showing you how the Abbot Family have set up their homestead to be alien-proofed. I personally found that the locale of a mostly secured farm in the middle of Upstate New York traded off great set pieces for interesting world-building. Which is fine because I really liked that world-building, and the set pieces that were there, like the fireworks ruse and the grain silo trap and the marked steps, they had a charm to them. But I felt like I needed something meatier. I needed an environment that would make every second of existing in it feel like a risk.
And Day One does that handily, turning New York City into a brutal and unforgiving hunting ground. Your eyes end up darting around the frame, leaving you to wonder what errant piece of glass or object in view is going to make the noise that brings an eldritch stampede through to eviscerate everything in its path. Every street, every corner, and every subway station becomes a new dead zone of sound stalked by faceless nightmares, whose roars cut to the bone as fast as their teeth do. Which, on the topic of body shaking roars, you should be seeing this film in IMAX. It’s worth it just for the sound mixing and the foley work alone, which are some of the best I’ve heard all year.
The Best A Quiet Place’s Aliens Have Ever Looked
And let’s talk about the franchise’s unnamed aliens (I’ve seen some fans call them Death Angels because of an in-universe newspaper clipping, but I kind of prefer them as a nameless horde). You see them constantly throughout the whole film, Day One never lets that get stale. The special effects used to model them have certainly come a long way, with the textures of their mottled grey armor and the few bits of raw flesh we get to see underneath blow the original out of the water thanks to advances in digital SFX.
Even in plain sight, their uncomfortably fast movement makes them a gazelle mauling lion, a skulking trap door spider, and a man crushing rhinoceros all at once, changing how they approach on the fly to suit their hunt. It’s all about how director Michael Sarnoski frames them that makes this possible, with his use of lighting being supreme in silhouetting the monsters and making them more imposing. The opening sequence of the film reminded me a lot of The Mist for some kind of obvious reasons, but it’s mostly appropriate because Sarnoski really did manage to take these creatures which in previous films became very killable, and reinjected a lot of the intimidating horror they had to them when they were lurking around in the shadows as the new and indisputable top of the food chain.
That being said, the creature design itself does look a bit goofy in some wide shots, with one particular shot meant to show the scale of their attack being particularly odd; these instances are far and few between, with them looking great for most of the runtime.
Lupita Nyong’O and Joseph Quinn Bring Next-Level Performances
But what does all of this alien fear amount to if you’re not invested in the people on the ground, the everyday person thrust into the apocalyptic alien invasion? And that was where I was most surprised with A Quiet Place: Day One, because it certainly has some of my favorite horror leads of the year, and given the audience reactions I’ve heard, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) and her unlikely friend Eric (Joseph Quinn) are going to be horror fan favorites for a good long while.
Lupita Nyong’o is so unbelievably good in this, playing the beleaguered Sam whose already terrible life kind of just spins down the drain even faster with the invasion of Earth. But her struggles, her character motivation, and her character development over the course of an engrossing 100 minutes are so perfectly arranged and executed that she feels real to an uncanny level. Joseph Quinn deserves praise as well for the physical aspect of his acting talents, because there’s this palpable feeling to his pain in this movie that I couldn’t get over; his shuddering and panic, his unrest and terror, it’s all played with a full-tilt intensity and fully trained expertise. Nyong’o and Quinn’s chemistry amplifies their natural talents to an unbelievable level; they make you feel a genuine bond between these characters, united by their suffering, that makes for a compelling watch.
The way I really know I was totally absorbed by Day One is that by a third of the way through, I felt fairly confident that I knew exactly how it was going to play out. And while I was right, there still wasn’t a single moment where I wasn’t on the edge of my seat just watching it go that way. Because like with many great things, it’s about the journey more than the destination. A Quiet Place: Day One is a journey that’s at turns heart-pounding, with moments that will leave you dead silent– but it’s a true rarity, and the real reason you need to see it, is how heartfelt it becomes, and how it sticks with your emotionally.
