A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
More often than not, prequels don't
interest me; most recently, I found Furiosa to be a significant letdown
earlier this summer. So it was a pleasant surprise to find myself enjoying
writer/director Michael Sarnoski's A Quiet Place: Day One.
Lupita Nyong'o plays Samira, a poet in
hospice for terminal cancer. Her hospice center takes Samira and other
residents on a day trip to Manhattan when the aliens invade. For those
unfamiliar with A Quiet Place, the killer aliens have insanely good
hearing but can't see or swim.
Samira sets off on her own with her pet
cat, Frodo. She wants to walk north to Harlem to see some cherished places from
her childhood (a pizza parlor and a jazz club her father performed at) one last
time. Along the way, she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), a recently arrived law
student from England who does not know his way around so he latches on to her.
The previous entries in the A Quiet
Place franchise took place in rural areas, so the change of setting to
Manhattan works. The movie makes the most of new locations: a flooded subway
tunnel, a glass skyscraper, and a cathedral, among others.
But the reason the movie works is it
makes us care about Samira and Eric (and Frodo the cat). Their friendship feels
real even though they can't say very much to each other for safety reasons.
Nyong'o has a wonderfully expressive face and she's able to convey depths of
emotion while speaking infrequently. Quinn, who starred in the last season of Stranger
Things, also acquits himself quite well here. They're the main reason I
found the film's third act moving.
If Hollywood is going to insist on
repeatedly going back to the well of existing franchises, then may those films
all be as imaginative and humane as A Quiet Place: Day One.
