“A Quiet Place: Day One” misses the mark, failing to leave a lasting impact despite its high potential and talented cast.
In many ways, horror is the ultimate form of speculative fiction. Through the lens of the horror genre, audiences have repeatedly witnessed humankind’s demise. At their best, horror works offer us profound insights into ourselves and the darkest recesses of our minds. On a primordial level, we are all monsters, and the horror stories that linger in public consciousness across the decades are those that meaningfully and articulately explore the human condition through this genre. I say all this to point out that “A Quiet Place: Day One” is not a film that will linger in my consciousness for a week, much less a decade.
A prequel to the duology of John Krasinski-starring-and-directed films, “A Quiet Place: Day One” is a well-made film that showcases writer-director Michael Sarnoski (the talented filmmaker behind the exquisitely contemplative “Pig”) entering the world of big-budget filmmaking with finesse and aplomb. However, it is also an immensely frustrating viewing experience. The film all but wastes the elevating work of its lead performers, falls into a gratingly repetitive structure, and fundamentally fails to meaningfully engage with the story it purports to be telling.
TOP FIVE OF “A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE”
5. Weak Spot: The Opening Shot
A wise man once said that the opening shot of a film is the second most important shot of the entire project, surpassed only by the importance of the final shot. In this regard, “A Quiet Place: Day One” fails on both counts. We’ll revisit the final shot later, but as for the opening one, it feels insultingly superfluous, spoon-feeding its audience in the most condescending way imaginable. It bluntly ‘tells’ the audience something that Michael Sarnoski’s visuals and editing will be preoccupied with ‘showing’ for the entire first reel of the film.
The opening shot of “A Quiet Place: Day One” is some exceedingly generic B-roll footage of a helicopter shot above New York City. While it’s not awful in itself, it is a dull and uninspired choice. What makes it actively bad is the on-screen text layered over this shot, informing the audience that ‘the average sound level in the city is ninety decibels.’ The text then goes on to spell out that ‘this is the volume of a constant scream.’
Despite the film’s subsequent effort to convey the gratuitous level of noise emanating from New York City within the story, “A Quiet Place: Day One” decides it would be much better to hit the audience over the head with this information to make sure they get it. It’s an exceedingly weak and spineless narrative choice that feels like it was put together post-hoc in the edit.
4. Weak Spot: A Repetitive Slog
The A Quiet Place films have such a strong hook that one would think would truly lend itself to some spectacular works of horror cinema. Sound is 50% of the theatrical experience. By overtly foregrounding it and weaponizing it within the story of the film in such direct fashion, it would seem to free up the filmmakers to truly embrace some abrasive, innovative sound design and story choices. But if all of that is indeed the case, why do these films feel so much like one-trick ponies?
“A Quiet Place: Day One” has exactly one kind of setpiece: A character is trying to do something without making a sound. Then, something will happen that accidentally causes them to make a sound. Then, dozens of Death Angels (the name of the alien creatures in the film) will descend upon said character. If it happens to be one of the half-dozen times this happens to a main character, they’ll escape unharmed. If it happens to be one of the other half-dozen times it happens to an ancillary character, they’ll die.
This exact sequence of events plays out over and over again, ad nauseam, throughout the film. Not only does this make for a rote and seemingly rudderless viewing experience, it also actively deflates any sense of tension, drama, or suspense that the film actually has going for it. There’s only so many times that you can watch one of the lead characters escape from the jaws of death completely unharmed. By the midpoint of the film, any sense of emotional stakes had been chucked entirely out of the window by this very technique and structure.
What’s so frustrating about this is that this one setpiece is also the one setpiece the other Quiet Place films have utilized throughout. By this, the third film in the series, one would hope someone would have come up with some sort of escalation, some way to raise the stakes. “A Quiet Place: Day One’s” answer seems to be just throwing infinitely higher numbers of Death Angels at its characters for each setpiece than the other films could muster. But if anything, this only makes it all the more comical and unsatisfying to watch, as nothing comes from the sequences but some cheap, surface-level thrills.
3. Weak Spot: So Much Meat Left Untouched
Which brings us to the real problem at the heart of “A Quiet Place: Day One” – it is such a fundamentally uncurious work of speculative fiction. Despite all the marketing and the film’s title heavily suggesting an exploration of humankind’s first exposure to these Death Angels, “A Quiet Place: Day One” mines next-to-no drama from this idea.
The opening, pre-title card prologue of the film is the exception that proves the rule. Here, the prologue showcases the alien invasion as it happens and plays it like a deliberately disorienting and experiential disaster film. It’s an incredibly effective choice on Sarnoski’s part, pulling from the visual grammar of works like Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” adaptation and creating a genuinely visceral and upsetting opening sequence. But then the title card hits, and it might as well be a completely different, separate film altogether, set anywhere within the timeline of this world.
Lupita Nyong’o’s character Sam is knocked unconscious in the chaos of the first waves of hysteria incited by the invasion. The title card hits, and when Sam wakes up, everyone in New York City knows to remain silent or these monsters will eat them. It is as if, in the half-hour that Sam was unconscious, the entirety of the city was treated to screenings of the prior “Quiet Place” movies, so now they just immediately understand everything about these creatures and this world. It actively avoids exploring any sense of drama or conflict inherent to its premise. What happens when these noise-sensitive monsters besiege the noisiest city in the world? Nothing, apparently, because everyone just immediately figures everything out off-screen.
It isn’t a problem if the film itself is uncurious about providing any insights for audiences about the origins of these creatures. These films have always been light on overt exposition, hysterically attempting to fill audiences in in other ways such as Krasinski’s white board with “WEAKNESS???” written in all capital letters from the first film, so that’s not surprising. But it is a problem if the characters within the film are fundamentally uncurious about what is happening as well. No one in “A Quiet Place: Day One” seems the least bit interested in the existential or wide-ranging ramifications of what they are witnessing. If anything, they all act far more like Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s characters from the prior films, who were seasoned veterans within this world and whom you assumed knew more about it than you did as an audience member. But here, these characters are metaphorical newborns within this world and seem entirely and profoundly uncurious about what is unfolding all around them.
In these ways, the film feels as if it squanders its unique opportunity to explore the ways in which humanity reacted to the initial invasion by the Death Angels. After the prologue, it just feels like another “Quiet Place” film, preferring to maintain the established status quo in the dullest of ways rather than exploring new territory.
2. The Lead Performers
There are elements of “A Quiet Place: Day One” that absolutely do work, and I want to make sure I properly highlight that. As mentioned, I found Michael Sarnoski’s direction to be accomplished and really effective at times. I also thought that the overt embracing of emotion and sentimentality in Alexis Grapsas’ musical score was a real highlight. For me, the best parts of the film were the ones in which Sarnoski’s direction, Grapsas’ score, and the performances of both Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn were able to elevate the material to new heights.
To call the characters which Nyong’o and Quinn are playing one-dimensional feels like an understatement, but the genuine power of the film comes from these performers’ ability to take the skeletal foundation that is there and build to some truly affecting work. Nyong’o is one of the great performers of her generation and knows her way around a horror movie, having delivered an absolutely show-stopping set of performances in Jordan Peele’s “Us.” She commits to her performances so wholeheartedly, so unabashedly, and so physically that it has an almost subconscious effect on you as a viewer, pulling you deeper into the story of whatever film she’s in through the gravity of her work alone. Here, playing a woman in hospice when the invasion occurs, Nyong’o excels with a reserved and powerful sense of emotionality boiling beneath the surface.
Quinn is also no stranger to the genre, having given a scene-stealing performance in the fourth season of “Stranger Things” that catapulted the actor to stardom, and deservedly so. He was great as Eddie Munson in “Stranger Things,” and in entirely different ways, he is great here. As a petrified legal student from abroad, Quinn takes the idea of this being a ‘silent film’ and runs with it in surprising ways, his overt physicality and emoting evoking silent-era stars of the screen such as John Barrymore. In this way, Quinn’s performance does more inventive things with the core concept of this franchise than any filmmaker has thus far.
1. Weak Spot: The Conclusion
There’s a thematic thread that runs through “A Quiet Place: Day One,” grappling with the idea of small victories and minute beauties in the face of overwhelming death and destruction. Lupita Nyong’o’s character spends the film on a quest to get a slice of pizza from her favorite place in New York City, remaining steadfastly dedicated to this idea even after the invasion has commenced. She was in hospice pre-invasion, already prepared to die, and she sees no reason to change the way in which she lives her life now, going after the pizza.
In fascinating form, this offers the film a chance to engage in conversation with the other films in the franchise and deliver something of a core thematic statement for the series as a whole. In the first film, Blunt’s character is pregnant when we meet her, and this feels cut from the same cloth as Day One’s primary theme: finding beauty, happiness, and even new life in the face of all-but-certain doom. However, the extent to which Day One fumbles this idea by the end of its runtime is staggering.
First off, the waxing-and-waning nature of the writing here immediately dilutes the heft and emotion inherent to Nyong’o’s character’s would-be odyssey. With every few minutes of screentime interrupted by the same monotonous horror setpiece that goes nowhere and does nothing to advance character, theme, or story, this theme feels severely underbaked. It isn’t until the film’s end that it does finally get picked back up with any real earnestness, and we get the best scene of the film in the form of Nyong’o and Quinn tenderly relishing their small victory in the face of the devastation outside.
But that should have been the end of the film, right? Instead, “A Quiet Place: Day One” has a whole-ass third-act climax to get to after that, which culminates in a grossly atonal final shot that concludes the story and theme of the film on the most egregiously sour of notes. It’s flippant and unearned and feels like it’s attempting to reference the ending of the original film in the absolute worst of ways. It is a severely miscalculated ending shot, one so bad that it makes the entire film all the worse with its inclusion.
RGM GRADE
(D+)
“A Quiet Place: Day One” is a competently made film, and when director Michael Sarnoski feels like he’s telling a story he’s genuinely passionate about, there are moments of earnestness, tenderness, and beauty to be experienced within its runtime. However, most of its runtime is populated with repetitive and dull surface-level ‘thrills’ that fail to thrill on any level. In this way, “A Quiet Place: Day One” feels less like a cohesive story in which some scary things happen and much more like a series of preconceived setpieces tied together by the loosest of connective tissue.
