A Quiet Place: Day One is the opposite of summer fun
“Be quiet or die” is (A) a philosophy far more people should be forced to adopt and (B) seems an insufficient concept to fuel three full-grown movies. Yet hear we are. You see what I did there? “Hear” we are… Sorry, but if Jim from The Office gets to launch a blockbuster franchise from something I’ve yelled at a neighbor mowing their lawn too early, I get to pun my way through this review.
A Quiet Place: Day One promised a broader look at the “world” created by John Krasinski, which I’m going to say took him a minimum of 15 minutes to create. We had previously only seen one family’s struggle with aliens drawn to sound. I say “drawn to sound,” because the PG-13 constraints of the series mean that it’s not entirely clear why they murder based on noise. They don’t appear to be eating the noisemakers, just murdering them. They’re like an extraterrestrial species designed by a God with a migraine.
At any rate, I thought the prequel was going to show how the world went quiet. I thought this because the poster said “Witness the day the world went quiet.” Instead, it locks in essentially two characters: a terminally ill cancer patient named Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) and a stranger named Eric (Joseph Quinn), whose entire backstory is “British.” Instead of an explanation as to how all of humanity failed to stop creatures that cannot swim invading a planet that’s 70% water, we watch as Sam gruffly comes to embrace her mortality. Maybe there’s a version of this that is profound, but this incarnation is mostly insufferable.
That’s not Nyong’o’s fault. She is an exceptional talent and almost wills the inert, indulgent script into something useful. There’s just only so much someone can do with a screenplay that calls for multiple poems to be read out loud despite a conceit that demands silence. Nyong’o is so good, in fact, that she almost magics the film’s hollow simplicity into a deeper meaning, despite its being all obvious sad tropes set amid what could have been a fun disaster/invasion movie.
Maybe what Krasinski wrote under “Be quiet or die” was “No fun. Ever.” And then like three lines under “ever.” Because all three of these films are joined in being unnecessarily self-serious and morbid. Michael Sarnoski, who took over directing from Johnny K and wrote the screenplay from a cowritten story, leans even harder into the moroseness. To say… Something? Wait, maybe that’s part of it! You expect the series to have something to say because it is so dark and grim, but each installment doesn’t say anything because it’s a “quiet place.” Did I solve it?
For a world that often feels unbearable, escapism is no small thing. Instead, A Quiet Place: Day One dangles the prospect of summer spectacle only to deliver a nebulous meditation on death without any actual weight to it. When it comes to this series, I’ve heard enough.
Grade = C-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Siddhant Adlakha at Polygon says “Between Sam’s intense pain as she runs out of medication and Eric’s intense trauma from recent events, the characters don’t just have to avoid making sounds while moving. They instead have to suppress their natures, their primal need to scream as their lives crumble around them.”
Amy Nicholson at the Washington Post says “Those moments of moral paralysis, these glimpses of bloodied New Yorkers staggering across the screen unaided and unacknowledged, force us to acknowledge we’re not likely to save the world, either. So what then?”
Murjani Rawls at Substream Magazine says “Sarnoski infuses Day One with much of the Quiet Place ingredients you’ve learned, but doubles down on more of coming to grips with the catharsis of running out of time.”