A Quiet Place: Day One review (2024)

A Quiet Place: Day One breathes new life to the franchise with an unnerving and legitimately scary alternate look at the day the invaders arrived.

Lupita Nyong’o (The Wild Robot) stars as Samira, a terminally ill cancer patient in hospice care. Samira doesn’t have the greatest attitude and is generally cantankerous to her fellow patients and head nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff, Oppenheimer).

Reuben invites Samira on a group trip to New York City for a show. The show isn’t as alluring to Samira as the idea of getting some quality city pizza so with her faithful cat, Frodo, in tow she joins the excursion.

As their bad luck would have it this trip happens to coincide with Day One of the alien invasion.

Like most invaders the aliens are intent on wiping out all the original inhabitants they encounter, but there’s a twist as they can only attack what they can make out with their hyper-sensitive hearing.

Day One has a few things working in its favor over its predecessors. New York City provides an ample amount of fodder to get plucked off at the slightest whisper.

Day One director/writer Michael Sarnoski (Pig) leans in heavily to the franchise’s established rules. The aliens are swift and merciless in their death-dealing, savagely attacking their victims in brutal fashion. While ruthless fighters, the aliens can’t see well and can’t swim. That’s not a lot of vulnerabilities but it’s enough to give Sarnoski some creative means to keep characters alive.

One character we know for sure will make it through at least this installment is Djimon Hounsou’s Henri, who is a prominent player in A Quiet Place Part II. That’s part of the fun with this franchise as it allows for different vantage points to reach certain moments in the series’ continuity without disrupting the story that’s already been told.

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Sarnoski solidly finds ways to devise plenty of nerve-wracking talk to the screen moments. Samira quickly learns that in this type of setting strength in numbers is a fallacy and an easy way to get killed.

This is one of the major action sequences for Day One and it is incredibly suspenseful. With a little assist from her cat, Samira manages to escape and encounters another determined survivor, Eric (Joseph Quinn, Stranger Things).

In the face of such death and disaster, Eric finds some sense of purpose in helping Samira get her pizza. Nyongo’o and Quinn create a different bond than is the norm for survival thrillers. There’s no forced romantic subplot — just two people and a cat — trying to stay alive against these massive, hulking predators.

As has become her norm, Nyong’o delivers another excellent performance. It’s key in this franchise for the actors to communicate with their eyes and physical gestures far more than with dialogue. Nyong’o is stellar here with the added angle of playing a character who has a different outlook on life than most characters would in facing an alien invasion.

Quinn does a fine job of matching Nyong’o’s energy and presence. Not so much from being an obnoxious alpha male, but from being just as equally terrified while overcoming his fears to accomplish some heroic tasks.

Unlike the second installment, characters don’t have to constantly do dumb things to put themselves in vulnerable positions. The city backdrop also all kinds of dangerous noise makers, which ratchets up the uneasiness simply in watching characters walk around.

The skittering charges of the aliens accomplishes the desired effect of being as terrifying as possible.

Maintaining the silence is golden — and life-saving — town of the movie means that the audio mix on Day One can be challenging to make out what’s being said in the rare moments the characters are speaking. Most conversations are held with noisier background elements at play.

A Quiet Place: Day One brings all the scares and extended tension from the original back in play with some creatively staged action sequences and engaging performances from its two leads.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures

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