In big horror franchises, new additions usually prove the law of diminishing returns – look at the sequels to Scream, Halloween or Insidious. But A Quiet Place: Day One is something different: a prequel with a fresh directorial vision, a new ensemble cast and crucially, a scare rate that just won’t quit.
John Krasinski’s original A Quiet Place (2018) was set in a world where sightless, sound-sensitive alien invaders had conquered and spread across Earth. It had a clean-cut simplicity redolent of a Twilight Zone plot and explored its concept with a sensitivity about family, love, and home. This time, Krasinski’s story brings us back to a world more like our own – a thriving, noisy New York City – at the start of the invasion.
Lupita Nyong’o is Sam, an ordinary New Yorker with a pet cat (feline in jeopardy warning!) who finds herself trapped in a throng of squashed people as the aliens crash-land and spread like locusts across the five boroughs. Nyong’o is not known as a “scream queen” but proved her talent for reactive terror in Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us, where she moved between psychosis and fear with unsettling ease. Here, she displays that fear through her eyes – impossibly widened like a theatrical silent film star’s.
As humanity surges underground for survival – and as those who cannot remain silent perish with shocking speed – Sam meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), another bystander to the carnage. They team up with a young man who must learn to quiet his hair-trigger emotion (Alex Wolff, who gave a tortured performance in Ari Aster’s Hereditary), and the enigmatic but wise Henri (Djimon Hounsou), who has secret knowledge of the creature’s vulnerabilities. Scenes of a crumbling Manhattan, and the panic of its residents, can’t help but recall the paranoid terror of 9/11, giving more emotional weight to the apocalyptic chaos – particularly the crumbling bridges leaving the Manhattanites trapped on their island.
This is only director Michael Sarnoski’s second film, and it marks his graduation from “one to watch” to “star film-maker”. His first, the indie Pig (2021), was a sort-of-culinary-themed action-thriller starring Nicolas Cage as a grieving man on the hunt for his beloved pet, and was exciting and unpredictable in its switches between violence and tear-jerking drama. While it may seem strange to draw any parallels with a horror film about world-destroying aliens, in A Quiet Place: Day One he does the same.
It shifts between breathlessly choreographed chase sequences to talky drama, and it’s as interested in human tenderness as it is the monstrousness of the creatures looming beyond, with an unlikely and uneasy alliance forged between these profoundly different people who are willing to sacrifice for one another. It never goes for cheap gore where psychological realism will work – the sound design is a great helper in this, brilliantly deft and subtle, and key to a film all about silence and the sonic horror of noise.
The scares are sometimes of the simple, jumpy variety – but these are all the more powerful because of the mastery of suspense and how invested we feel in the characters and their vulnerability. Few survival stories are as intelligent as this.