Anti-prequel prequel

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/06/2024 (785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Even as The Quiet Place concept gets a new addition, this “look to the skies” series continues to be admirably anti-franchise.

After the hushed, intimate 2018 original, which showed the Abbott family (John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) struggling to survive an invasion of aliens that hunt by sound, there was a slightly noisier but still solid sequel in 2020.

Now we have a prequel, with a different set of characters and a different creative team. A Quiet Place: Day One is not particularly scary and it could use more narrative oomph, but it’s not an obligatory “extended universe” cash-in.

Instead, with a grounding central performance by Lupita Nyong’o (Us, Black Panther), this offbeat creature feature delivers a small, focused story with an unexpectedly soulful undertow.

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski (known for Pig, one of the recent good Nic Cage flicks) switches from the rural setting of the first two films and heads to New York City. As a bit of opening text tells us, NYC “gives off a steady 90 decibels of noise,” which also happens to be “the level of a constant scream.”

Nyong’o plays Samira, a poet with terminal cancer and an admirably bad attitude about it. Reuben (Hereditary’s Alex Wolff), a nurse at the rundown hospice where Samira lives, pushes her to go on an outing to the city. She agrees, so long as they stop to get pizza at Patsy’s.

The planned pizza outing gets sidelined — spectacularly — when the alien invasion hits. Soon New York is swarming with deadly, implacable hunters, all ears and claws and bony legs.

Samira, who has perhaps a different take on the end of the world because her own end is so near, decides she’s going to go get that pizza anyway, dammit, and she starts heading to Harlem, along with her emotional-support cat Frodo (played by Nico and Schnitzel, both absolute troupers).

This might seem like a low-stakes hook for a story about the apocalypse, but when Samira runs into forlorn survivor Eric (Joseph Quinn, who was such a scene-stealer as Eddie Munson in Stranger Things), their shared, silent journey takes on emotional weight.

Day One may involve the utter devastation of one of the world’s great cities, but the mass death mostly stays off-screen. Despite making clear visual nods to genre classics such as Alien and Jurassic Park, Sarnoski is not that interested in sustained action set-pieces. He’s more concerned with conveying a sense of confusion and disorientation, which he does effectively, making what feel like references to 9/11 (dazed, stricken New Yorkers covered in ash) and the COVID crisis (the eeriness of silent streets and empty parks).

While we do get chilling images of the invaders crawling up the sides of skyscrapers like big ugly bugs, this isn’t one of those over-explainy origin-story prequels. We don’t learn much more about the whys and wherefores of the extra-terrestrials. A scene in which Frodo chases a rat suggests the creatures invade planets and kill their inhabitants simply because it’s in their nature to do so.

The series continues to be somewhat arbitrary about noise levels — the ripping of cotton can be fatal, but footsteps are mostly fine. Narrative shifts are so abrupt one suspects some subplots were started and then dropped. Djimon Hounsou (who was in A Quiet Place Part II, credited only as “Man on Island”) is here, for example, giving some sense of how the films are related, but one suspects some of the scenes involving his family are missing.

Despite these gaps, A Quiet Place: Day One works as a melancholy tone poem and a weirdly touching buddy pic. Never mind the aliens. The film is about what it means to be human when death is imminent, and what really matters — compassion, friendship, music, poetry and, of course, pizza.

Nyong’o is essentially a silent-film star in Day One. She proved herself as a brilliantly expressive physical actor in Us, and her work here is so good she pulls off the movie’s bittersweet ending.

She even sells us on the symbolic, life-and-death importance of the perfect slice.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca