By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn and Alex Wolff
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski
Paramount
An opening title on A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE informs that New York City has an average decibel level of 90, the same as a prolonged scream. If you’ve regularly spent time there, you might consider that an underestimation. Which makes it the perfect setting for a QUIET PLACE movie, since the very absence of sound in such a typically busy place carries an eerie chill of its own. And while threequels, inside and outside the horror genre, often see their filmmakers upping the ante in terms of action and incident, writer/director Michael Sarnoski goes in the opposite direction.
Taking over for John Krasinski, with whom he shares story credit, Sarnoski makes this prequel an even more personal story of survival than its predecessors. Instead of an imperiled family, the focus is on Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient undergoing hospice care somewhere in New Jersey. Resigned to her short life expectancy, and feeling no need to put a positive spin on her situation, she agrees to join a field trip into Manhattan only after her nurse/chaperone Reuben (Alex Wolff) agrees that they’ll stop at her favorite pizzeria on the way back. The fact that said eatery is in Harlem, and the outing is to a marionette show in Chinatown, turns out to be the least of the complications.
The visit is interrupted by the falling meteors that presage the appearance of the spindly, rapacious, sound-sensitive monsters bent on exterminating and devouring Earth’s population. Krasinski previously dramatized Day One in A QUIET PLACE: PART II’s prologue, staging it as a terrifying suburban mini-apocalypse. Despite working on a much larger potential canvas, Sarnoski largely keeps the scale small, a few brief major-destruction setpieces notwithstanding. He and cinematographer Pat Scola keep close with Samira as she flees from one hiding place to another while the city goes to hell around her. One of the scary things about the way he presents this alien attack is how quickly the Big Apple devolves into a war zone, with smoke and ash suffusing everything. (The visual metaphors for 9/11 are potent for being unforced.) Since we already know what the creatures are about and how they behave, Sarnoski can do a lot with brief glimpses and audio-enhanced suggestion to give Samira plenty to be frightened about.
It helps to have an actress as soulful and expressive as Nyong’o, who can convey so much without dialogue and brings great empathy to Samira even as she and Sarnoski refuse to sentimentalize her. She encounters other pockets of survivors (and, in one of the most moving scenes, a large group of them), but she’s on a personal mission, and making it to that pizzeria becomes a test of her ability to forestall death, now that it’s coming in a more immediate form. From the start, she’s not alone; she has brought her emotional support cat Frodo, who is loyal and resilient and fortunately never meows. Then, in midtown, she encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn), a Brit law student stranded far from home and family in the middle of this urban nightmare. Samira isn’t interested in company, but he needs someone to cling to, and as they head uptown together, they develop a bond that becomes quite touching in the midst of all the tension.
As intimate and attuned to these two strangers learning to trust each other as Sarnoski’s approach is, it remains resolutely tough-minded throughout A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE. While Samira and Eric are unable to communicate with any but whispered words (lacking the advantage of sign-language fluency the previous films’ family enjoyed), they nonetheless convey a great deal of feeling and share palpable chemistry. They’re pretty much the whole show here, with all others in the cast playing bit roles; Djimon Hounsou, despite his prominent billing, has what amounts to an extended cameo, an Easter egg tying this film in to PART II.
The impact of this tight focus very much compensates for the fact that there isn’t much that can surprise us about the extraterrestrial menaces. Their m.o. is as it was before, with a new flourish here and there (stampeding armies of them shake the streets like an earthquake), yet while their assaults are sporadic, Sarnoski makes them count, with dynamic staging and a number of potent scares. It is really because we care so much about the imperiled duo that A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE emerges as a worthy addition to this franchise, and it represents an effortless jump by Sarnoski, who scored with the Nicolas Cage-starring indie PIG, to higher-level filmmaking. While nailing the big picture (filming London for NYC–a lot more persuasively than, say, MORBIUS did), he’s also good with grace notes and recurring themes, like water as a source of salvation: As we learned in PART II, the monsters can’t swim, and characters use the sounds of fountains and pouring rain as audible cover. He has clearly put a lot of thought into what could have been just an exercise in brand extension, placing DAY ONE among the few recent origin stories that both honor what came before and stand as their own films.
