‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Review: A Horror Prequel With a Surprisingly Tender Heart

Early in A Quiet Place: Day One, terminal cancer patient Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is displeased when she learns that the “show” in Manhattan that she’s been dragged to with a group of hospice residents is, in fact, a marionette performance. She has very little time to live—already having outlasted her diagnosis—and now she’s spending what could be her last day watching an old man make a puppet dance on stage. But in the space of a minute, Sam finds herself transfixed by the delicate artistry on display, and is moved nearly to tears. Whatever she was expecting from the one-man puppet show, this is something different, elegance from within the artifice of children’s entertainment. 

With this, writer/director Michael Sarnoski, who delivered 2021’s bizarre and heartbreaking drama Pig, fixes his signature onto a very big check. He knows that audiences likely don’t expect much out of A Quiet Place: Day One, the latest extension of Paramount’s mid-budget, high-margin survival horror franchise. Sarnoski suggests that viewers adjust those expectations, and it’s a dangerous gamble for any storyteller to call their shot like this, to all but step into frame and tell the audience “Just watch, I’m gonna make you cry with my studio horror franchise prequel featuring over-designed CGI aliens.” But Sarnoski’s delivers something much more refreshing and heartfelt than the high-adrenaline, IMAX-ready creature feature that the film’s inescapable marketing has suggested. A Quiet Place: Day One is a surprisingly tender and moving film that uses the franchise’s alien apocalypse to tell its own, very different story.

A Quiet Place and its 2020 sequel follow a small town American family who have survived for a year in a world ravaged by alien predators with no eyesight but incredible hearing. Those films, both directed by John Krasinski, are about a family unit’s struggle to hold together despite the traumas that have pulled them apart and the anguish that they cannot express verbally, for fear of being literally torn to shreds by monsters. Rather than simply retreading these themes, prequel Day One approaches the premise sideways, following a character who feels she has nothing to lose. She has no attachments save for her service cat Frodo, and even if she somehow evades the alien beasties who have crash-landed all across the planet, she’ll likely die tomorrow anyway. What does the end of the world mean to someone whose world has already ended?

Day One alternates between long stretches of careful silence and wild jump-scare drum solos. The chase scenes and silent obstacle courses will tickle your reptilian brain, as designed, but they’re also the least interesting part of the movie. (This was also the case with the first Quiet Place.) Underneath all this garish garnish, Day One is actually very sweet, even funny, and features one of the cutest cinematic relationships of the year. The friendship that develops between strangers Sam (Nyong’o) and law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) over a span of time not much longer than the movie itself feels as genuine and beautiful as the familiar bond in the main line Quiet Place films, if not moreso.

Day One’s setting also helps to distinguish this prequel in more than just the obvious ways. The challenges of moving silently through the streets of Manhattan are, naturally, different from forests and farmland, but the more important distinction is the film’s place in time. A Quiet Place is set in a post-apocalypse populated by desperate people whose trust in each other has been totally eroded, essentially the same environment as gritty zombie epics The Last of Us or The Walking Dead. But, in the limited temporality of Day One, the world is still in the middle of ending and humanity has not yet turned on itself. It’s an illustration of the moment of disaster, when people reach out to each other, rather than the aftermath in which people divide back into distrustful factions. (As in most disaster movies set in 21st century New York, there are some unsubtle evocations of 9/11 imagery.)

Sarnoski demonstrates such command of tone and character that it’s jarring whenever the less ambitious version of the movie — the one we were all primed to expect — rears its head. A block of warm, touching scenes of drama are interrupted by a consequence-free jump scare, which seems to exist only because there hadn’t been one for a while. The internal journey of Nyong’o’s character, which she has conveyed expertly for the entire film, gets a graceless and unnecessary verbal summation at the last minute. Djimon Hounsou reprises his role from A Quiet Place: Part Two, and though his inclusion wouldn’t be distracting to anyone who hasn’t seen it, it still sniffs of lame brand synergy that adds nothing to the film other than a cheap pop for the franchise faithful.

But even with these flaws, and even with Sarnoski recklessly calling his shot on screen, A Quiet Place: Day One absolutely overdelivers. What could have been an over-inflated expansion of a successful small-scale horror story is instead a worthy successor and a strong film in its own right. If every profitable movie must spawn a franchise, then this is exactly how it should be done.