A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)  

Review: written September 2024

Prequel delivers what it must, but no more

The latest “Quiet Place” movie marks a pivot away from the Emily Blunt / John Krasinski family unit we met in the first two, to explore the origins of the alien invasion from the perspective of a terminally ill woman in New York City. It’s a brave move, from the rural setting of the originals to the city, and from a family unit trying to survive, to a woman who just wants to survive long enough to have one last pizza from her favourite restaurant.

On the plus side, Lupita Nyong’o (as Sam) puts in a committed performance, aided in no small part by Frodo her therapy cat, and Eric (Joseph Quinn) as someone else she ends up travelling with as she heads across the city. It’s a nice balance of the aloof woman who is conserving emotional and physical energy, with no desire to make new relationships, contrasted with Eric the average-Joe trying to come to terms with this sudden shift in reality and needing another human to share the moment. Their journey to acceptance together forms the heart of the movie, albeit with plenty of moments of tension and terror along the way. In truth, the movie feels more like a disaster movie than a horror movie, with a big disaster (alien invasion) befalling the city, followed by a small band of survivors’ individual tales then unfolding against that milieu. There’s a moment where we come across a quiet shuffle of people herding towards the waterfront in the hope of rescue, and Sam is heading in the opposite direction. It reminded me of the sense of foreboding I had in a scene from The Poseidon Adventure when a crowd of survivors are heading “the wrong way”, and Gene Hackman can do nothing to dissuade them.

In short, it uses a big scale setting and event to tell an altogether intimate story, which is admirable and refreshing in today’s world where sequels are perceived to have to be bigger to be better. It doesn’t try to retread the highlights of the previous highly successful movies, another plus, while still including plenty of “don’t make a noise” moments for the franchise devotees. The ravaged cityscape is convincing enough (despite being mostly filmed on London soundstages), shot through a dusty colour washed haze.

Kudos also, for choosing a character whose relationship with the possibility of death is quite different than convention would have us expect.

All positive then, which makes me feel all the more at the end of the movie that it was a somewhat ‘whelming’ experience. I was neither overtly impressed, or underwhelmed. It was pretty much what it said on the tin, a movie set on day one of the event, and held little in the way of surprises. Still, it’s a quality outing, memorable performances, and better than many prequels turn out to be, so it gets a tentative thumbs up from me.