A Quiet Place: Day One review – Silence is golden

You’re on your own. If we’ve learned anything from the dozens of tales chronicling the collapse of civilisation as we know it, it’s that when the chips are down, people will become especially self-serving. In the dystopian context of zombies, plague, self-harm-inducing aliens, meteor strike, nuclear apocalypse, the Mayan End Times, and just plain ecological collapse, people have every right to be suspicious of others. They’ll do whatever it takes to survive, and that means theft, betrayal, murder and worse are all on the table.

Which makes the A Quiet Place film series already unusual. For end-of-the-world thrillers, the movies are oddly reassuring about human goodness in the face of crisis. Strangers typically help strangers, putting their lives on the line to do so. They share information and resources, proving that maybe we aren’t irredeemable as a species, and can overcome toxic divisiveness. And the latest film in the A Quiet Place saga, prequel and spin-off A Quiet Place: Day One continues the heartening trend.

While A Quiet Place Part II’s Djimon Hounsou makes an appearance in Day One, the new film, written and directed by Pig’s Michael Sarnoski, can be considered standalone, and easily watched without knowledge of the other franchise entries. In fact, it may be to viewers’ advantage as it means the nightmare scenarios that characters find themselves in are wholly fresh, and not a retread of moments from the other films – which does happen on occasion here.

Still, the Abbott family, headed by Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, do not feature in Day One at all. Rather, the action centres on Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a woman who is feeling constrained by her circumstance, and really just waiting for everything to be over. Sam, with her service cat Frodo, is in New York City on the day the world changes forever… in the A Quiet Place universe at least. Drawing chilling parallels to the chaos and destruction of 9/11 – right down to shots of ash-painted, stunned people staggering in-between smoking buildings – the city is torn apart by alien invasion. Impossibly strong, fast and tough, the invading creatures navigate solely by sound, forcing humanity to turn silent, or be slaughtered.

Instead of adopting an ensemble approach, like, say, Independence Day, A Quiet Place: Day One stays locked on Sam, resulting in a more intimate tale. The cast is slightly expanded by Alex Wolff’s male nurse Reuben, and, later in the film, a far more important role for Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn as Eric, a British law student out of his depth and alone in the disaster. Sam has a personal mission she wants to tick off, but also aids Eric in getting out of the locked down city to safety.

While A Quiet Place: Day One delivers chair-clawing moments of tension, and explosive disaster movie beats, it includes just as many lulls between the action. It may officially be classified as a horror thriller, but the film is, at its core, surprisingly understated and character driven, helped by performers who are exceptionally emotive without words. After Jordan Peele’s Us, Nyong’o proves yet again that she excels at horror, emerging as the literal opposite of a Scream Queen. She’s so good here, in fact, that you may resent Quinn’s character taking the focus away from her later in the film.

Speaking of silence, though, A Quiet Place: Day One, like the original A Quiet Place, adopts a necessitated “show don’t tell” approach to its world-building. With characters barely able to whisper, there are no clunky exposition dumps via dialogue. Instead, the audience is drip fed information, typically via environmental clues, to flesh out the context, and make their own assumptions. That’s a pleasant change after so many blockbusters club viewers in the head with explanation.

A Quiet Place: Day One does a lot to make itself immersive and convincing, with the latter extending to the film’s believable GCI, and its apparent use to transform the streets of NYC. The flipside is that all the entrenching in credibility is undermined in certain scenes where characters abandon survival objectives to do things for contrived big screen drama. These moments stand out as starkly as car alarms for the creatures, and are frustrating. At the same time, while the film does account for it, Frodo’s unshakeable, chilled demeanour may be hard to swallow for cat parents in the audience.

Still, A Quiet Place: Day One emerges as a smart and (mostly) satisfying blockbuster. At the very least, it proves that the A Quiet Place franchise, and its core concept, has a lot more room for exploration than initially apparent. If the films adopted more of an anthology format moving forward, well, that sounds like a good idea.

Having released on 28 June, A Quiet Place: Day One is in cinemas, including screening on large format screens like IMAX, right now.