Director: Michael Sarnoski
Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 99 mins

A Quiet Place: Day One is the latest in the expanding series, functioning both as a prequel and spin-off. While A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II focussed on the Abbott family, Day One relocates the action to New York and follows Sam (Lupita Nyong’o). 

Sam is a terminally ill cancer patient who lives at a hospice. Thinking she’s had her last visit to the city before her death, she’s convinced to join a trip to a marionette show in Manhattan by a nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff) with the promise of pizza afterwards. However, things take an apocalyptic turn when meteor-like objects fall from the sky mid-performance. As the extraterrestrial creatures take ahold of New York City, the citizens are encouraged to make their way to a boat because the creatures can’t swim. Sam, on the other hand, decides she would rather stay in the city and get pizza from her favourite restaurant, Patsy’s. 

Unlike its predecessors which were both directed by John Krasinski (but he still gets a story credit here), Michael Sarnoski is in the director’s chair this time around. Sarnoski’s debut feature was Pig, which I utterly despised, so I was rightfully rather trepidatious heading into A Quiet Place: Day One. 

A Quiet Place: Day One fortunately isn’t a disaster and there’s a lot that it gets right amidst more shortcomings. You mileage will vary depending on how much you buy into the story of a terminally ill individual wanting to eat pizza, as well as regular defiances of logic. On the plus side, while Sarnoski’s direction of Pig was bland, it isn’t here. 

While the film’s overly schmaltzy in its quieter moments, I liked the more thoughtful idea of coming to terms with death within an apocalypse  and the film is visually interesting. I liked how we see the creatures in broad daylight, whereas Krasinski tended to keep them in the dark the first time round. There’s some good set-pieces too, but unfortunately Sarnoski often doesn’t develop them. The film also would have benefitted from another re-write as the dialogue is quite wooden in places and although it’s only 99 minutes, cutting it down by 15-20 minutes would have made for a more effective piece. 

It’s Lupita Nyong’o who really holds the film together. She tells us a lot about her character through her facial expressions, especially the pain and grief she’s experiencing. Joseph Quinn didn’t do much for me but Alex Wolff is excellent as Reuben and is almost unrecognisable.

While A Quiet Place: Day One is a rewrite and edit away from being pretty good, the result is an interesting mess held together by an excellent Lupita Nyong’o performance. It’s definitely better than A Quiet Place: Part II and it’s not far off the quality of the first, which despite its excellent concept I find to be quite overrated.