A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
Back to the Beginning
A Quiet Place: Day One is the third installment of the Quiet Place franchise, a chilling sci-fi saga about Earth being invaded by blind extraterrestrials with hypersensitive hearing. The only hope for survival is to be as quiet as possible, so that the aliens won’t detect your presence. The film is set chronologically before the previous two movies and depicts the initial alien invasion.
Samira (Lupita Nyong’o) is a terminally ill hospice patient living with her cat Frodo in New York City. After the aliens attack, she initially hides in a theater with other survivors. She eventually meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), a British law student. Along with Frodo, they make a harrowing journey through the destroyed city to find refuge.
Day One is a well made film on a technical level. The directing, acting, and production values are all good. Unfortunately it has a fatal flaw: a lack of interesting characters.
the protagonists are meh
The problem with Samira and Eric is that they are just flat out boring. Samira’s defining characteristic is that she’s obsessed with pizza. The world is ending and all she can think about is having one last slice before she dies. I’m sure this is supposed to be quirky and funny, but it just seems dumb to me. As for Eric, he does nothing other than fill the “generic male lead” role. There isn’t anything particularly memorable about him.
Eric and Samira have no chemistry together. Unlike the Abbott family from A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, they are strangers who are thrown together due to happenstance. Their relationship feels robotic and perfunctory. You know you’re in trouble when the cat is the most compelling character in the movie.
It’s a waste because Nyong’o and Quinn are talented actors. They’ve both delivered strong performances in previous roles. Nyong’o was great in Us and Quinn was fun in Stranger Things. But these shallowly-written characters don’t give them much material for them to work with.
An Unnecessary origin tale
This movie just feels superfluous. An original setting would have helped. We’ve seen New York City get destroyed by monsters in countless movies. Did we really need yet another apocalyptic flick set in the Big Apple? I wonder if New Yorkers ever get tired of seeing their city get destroyed in movies again and again and again.
The blind alien monsters wreak the usual havoc, but at this point the novelty has worn off. The sense of fear and menace that was instilled in the first two movies is mostly missing here. Plus, there’s no way for a horror movie to be scary if we don’t care about the characters.
Rating
A Quiet Place: Day One is a by-the-numbers effort that lacks a compelling reason to exist, other than to wring more box office bucks from this popular franchise. I’m not sure a third movie was necessary in the first place, but another installment with the remaining Abbott family would have been a better choice.
Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 5
