Director/Screenplay – Michael Sarnoksi, Story – John Krasinski & Michael Sarnoksi, Producers – Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller & John Krasinski, Photography – Pat Scola, Music – Alexis Grapsas, Visual Effects Supervisor – Malcolm Humphreys, Visual Effects – Cadence Effects (Supervisor – Craig Crawford), Important Looking Pirates VFX (Supervisor – Grant Walker) & Industrial Light and Magic, Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Holt, Production Design – Simon Bowles. Production Company – Platinum Dunes/Sunday Night.
Cast
Lupita Nyong’o (Samira ‘Sam’), Joseph Quinn (Eric), Alex Wolff (Reuben), Djimon Hounsou (Henri)
Plot
Sam is a patient in a Harlem hospice with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She, along with her support cat Frodo, joins her nurse Reuben on a trip into Manhattan to visit a puppet theatre. The performance is interrupted with orders from authorities to evacuate. Creatures begin to appear everywhere, attacking people. Sam is dragged to safety amid the mass devastation. She quickly learns that the creatures attack anybody that makes the slightest sound. As others get to the safety of a ship, Sam decides she wants to return to Harlem. She is joined by Eric, a young British man come to New York to study law. Together the two try to make their way through the destruction and avoid the alien creatures.
A Quiet Place (2018) proved to be a sleeper hit with its unique and original story of a family at siege from creatures that attacked the slightest sound. It was produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company and directed by actor John Krasinski, who played the lead alongside his real-wife Emily Blunt. The film’s success was followed by a sequel A Quiet Place Part II (2020) again directed by John Krasinski and starring Emily Blunt, which revealed the creatures to be alien in origin. This received good notices from the public, although I remained more muted in my response. A Quiet Place: Day One is a third film in the series. This time around John Krasinski has retired from the director’s chair, although is still present providing the story and as one of the producers. The new director is Michael Sarnoksi, a newcomer who received considerable critical acclaim with the Nicolas Cage starring Pig (2021).
As the title suggests, A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel that takes events back to the start of the alien invasion. It should also be pointed out that this is not the first time the series has done so as the opening sections of A Quiet Place Part II also took place on the same figurative Day One. This makes a small change in the nature of the series – the previous two films were post-apocalyptic ones with a handful of survivors trying not to make a noise in the aftermath of civilised collapse, whereas A Quiet Place: Day One is more a work of Catastrophe, featuring a reasonable degree of mass destruction as the aliens attack en masse. It also sees the series leaving the previous film’s rural surroundings for the urban one of New York (although for all its featuring such an iconic location, A Quiet Place: Day One was actually shot in England).
Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong’o flee through the mass destruction
The basic set up of A Quiet Place: Day One is a familiar one – the people caught in the midst of overwhelming devastation and attack by creatures is one we have seen in films from The War of the Worlds (1953) through to Independence Day (1996) to devastating effect in the recent Godzilla Minus One (2023). In its scenes of people fleeing through the devastation, trapped under cars, being abruptly snatched, or creatures bursting through windows, or tossing aside vehicles, this is no different to any of others in the genre. Michael Sarnoksi creates some fairly hair-raising tension and a fair number of jump-in-your-seats scenes, particularly in the scenes with the creatures coming down the subway stairs and the journey into a series of water-filled tunnels. The film is constantly on the move, only slowing down in a handful of scenes.
If you were to strip A Quiet Place: Day One down to just being a description of its plot elements, it would read as no more than a fairly generic variation on one of the aforementioned large-scale mass destruction alien invasion films. The difference here – and one that most audiences appear to have responded to – is that the film takes some time and effort to characterise the two principals – Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn. In most disaster films, the people caught in the midst of the catastrophe are stock types – it used to be standard in 1970s disaster movies to see their personal dramas play out in a B plot. By contrast, this becomes a film where the personal dramas become the A plot. It is the often touching story about two complete strangers who connect and create a bond through being thrust together in the midst of a catastrophe.
