A Quiet Place Day One Review: Prequel Sacrifices Heart for Spectacle

When John Krasinski wrote and directed A Quiet Place in 2018, there was a certain amount of success that came from viewers’ curiosity at seeing The Office star try his hand at a high-concept horror film about sound-sensitive monsters. The first film surprised many with its breakout success at the box office ($341 million on a budget of $17 million) – but also with its critical acclaim, which praised the way that Krasinski and his real-life wife actress Emily Blunt used the film’s premise (life-or-death need for silence) to illustrate the unspoken bonds between family, in everything from intuiting feelings to how we can still interact and communicate with those close to us, even without speech. More importantly, selecting a family unit as the franchise protagonists made every main character in A Quiet Place feel indispensable – and every loss felt deeply impactful. Even as the world of the film got bigger in the sequel and the characters split up, the focus on family bonds felt just as present, as audiences hoped to see the Abbott family reunited.

A Quiet Place: Day One now attempts to move the franchise focus beyond the Abbott Family while advertising big reveals about the larger franchise storyline and the beginnings of the alien invasion of the “Death Angel” monsters. Unfortunately, the prequel’s biggest revelation is that this franchise is being approached as more of an anthology than as a shared universe of interconnected stories – and as a standalone chapter, it’s hard to see Day One as a compelling horror movie, rather than a well-acted character drama. 

WARNING: Mild spoilers for A Quiet Place: Day One below

The plot of the prequel centers on Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient living out her final days in hospice care outside NYC with only her pet cat, Frodo, as a companion. Sam and some other patients are given a field trip into the city to see a stage performance, with supervising nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff) promising Sam she can get pizza in the city. Of course, the pleasant day becomes the worst of their doomed lives, when the Death Angel invasion begins, with the streets of the city being overrun in minutes by the beasts, causing a horrific event that echoes the 9/11 attacks. 

Sam and Frodo survive the initial slaughter, ending up in a shelter with other survivors. However, even if the group manages to hold together and follow the rules of silence, it quickly becomes clear that so many humans crammed together in a small hunting ground like Manhattan is nothing but a charnel house. With limited time left, and her condition worsening by the hour without proper medical care, Sam resigns herself to making a trek up to her old home in Harlem, to have a last meal at her favorite childhood pizza place. Along the way, Sam and Frodo pick up a straggler named Eric (Joseph Quinn), a law student from England who is just as alone in the crisis as Sam is. Together, the trio begin their journey – soon finding it coincides with the government’s attempt to stage a mass evacuation of Manhattan. 

A Quiet Place: Day One feels less like an expansion of the franchise storyline and more like a character study about Sam, Eric, and the dire situation and context that bonds them. It’s a mixed-bag result from writer/director Michael Sarnoski, who is best known for the acclaimed Nicolas Cage character drama Pig. Day One obviously offers the biggest spectacle and set pieces when it comes to the Death Angels and their attack on humanity – but as is so often the case, seeing more of the creatures (in broad daylight and in mass numbers) takes away a lot of the mystique and dread caused by sound and/or the viewer’s imagination. 

The previous Quiet Place films always made you wonder if a monster was within earshot; in Day One, there’s no guesswork needed, as the monsters are ever-present and anyone making any sound equals instant death. That new caveat often stretches credibility to the limit as NYC is, on a good day, nearly impossible to move through without generating noise – let alone when broken glass, debris, and bodies are lying all over the place. Any real walk through the destroyed city would probably last seconds, making Sam’s journey look foolish more so than brave. The only novelty scare the prequel offers (besides a few tense chase sequences) is seeing herds of the monsters moving together, shaking buildings and streets like an earthquake. It conveys just how big the scope of this problem is, how fearsome the Death Angels are, and therefore how important the Abbott Family’s discovery of a weakness in the monsters really is, if humanity is to survive. Day One also has (but somewhat squanders) the benefit of turning big groups of humans into an inherent threat – which is wonderfully depicted in a second-act sequence where an evacuation exodus goes horribly wrong. But since Sam opts to go it alone, the one major distinction Day One has for itself is eventually lost. 

Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn are both fantastic leads and ground the monster movie carnage in performances that echo real New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 and experienced those initial 24 hours of panic, grief, and loss – but also uplifting acts of human kindness and connection with strangers they might have never bonded with, otherwise. It’s a noble metaphor for a horror film that has high artistic aspirations; it is not all that effective for a B-movie horror-thriller experience. Much of Day One is watching the stars acting out small stage play-style vignettes in silence. Unlike Krasinski, Sarnoski has little levity (beyond gallows humor) to change up the dour pace and tone. Even by the end, given the story premise and where we know the connective threads (like Djimon Hounsou’s Henri) lead, there’s little to feel good about or celebrate. It’s a bad sign when concern for the animal protagonist is the driving force of a horror movie. 

A Quiet Place: Day One would’ve been a compelling indie horror film about a doomed woman facing an apocalyptic situation, but after the heights the franchise has reached and all the promises that came with the prequel, the end result is a fine film that is comparatively the worst entry in an otherwise excellent horror franchise. 

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters on June 28th.