A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE: Michael Sarnoski Efficiently Tears Apart NYC

Forty-five years after Alien, cat people finally have a new horror movie. A Quiet Place: Day One takes the extraterrestrial thriller series back to the first day of the apocalypse. Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a poet dying of cancer, gets trapped in Manhattan when the aliens invade, and she and her loyal, adorable cat Frodo have to navigate a New York hellscape in an epic quest for pizza.

While on paper, it sounds pretty whimsical, this prequel is tense, slick, and effective. It’s not the best film in the Quiet Place series — its simplicity is admirable, but the screenplay isn’t as tight as John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place or as ambitious as its sequel. But if you love horror movies, if you love this universe, if you love Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things, or if you just love cats, A Quiet Place: Day One delivers.

New York State Of Mind

A Quiet Place: Day One represents a pretty strange indie film-to-blockbuster leap for director Michael Sarnoski. His feature debut, Pig, centered on a backwoods truffle hunter played by Nicolas Cage searching for his stolen pig. Sarnoski made it for $3 million — if you pay for that entirely by selling expensive truffles, that’s about 9 lbs. of white truffles. (I’m proposing we start measuring film budgets in POT, or Pounds of Truffles.) Now, his second film is a $67 million sci-fi horror tentpole. That, reader, is over 191 POT — more, presumably, than Nic Cage and his pig can dredge up in a year.

Not all indie directors who make the jump to big-budget films do so with their voices or integrity intact. It’s hard to say if Day One feels authentically like a Michael Sarnoski film, since he’s only made one feature and it can sometimes take dozens of films to establish a creative voice and style. But Day One at least feels like it has a personal touch to it, thanks to its empathetic focus on character and grief when all producer and story writer John Krasinski and co. really needed was an exciting monster movie.

The opening 10 minutes of Day One sell you on Sarnoski’s vision and why Krasinski gave him the reins to this project. Melancholic, sensitive, wry, and unexpectedly funny, the beginning of the film eases you nicely into the end of the world. The characters are well-defined from the jump, especially Alex Wolff’s beleaguered but empathetic nurse, Reuben. I would have been happy to watch a cancer drama about Sam and Reuben’s prickly relationship, but alas, there are aliens a-coming.

The alien carnage is both satisfying and extensive. There’s only so much fun to be had when Sarnoski and his cinematographer, Pat Scola, lean into the miserable hazy Children of Men aesthetic and 9/11 imagery as heavily as they do, but I found sadistic glee in watching the aliens swat New Yorkers around like balls of yarn. How the script gets from “field trip to New York” to full-blown alien invasion is pretty clunky — who goes to the city to see a marionette show? And god damnit, do we need the protagonist to black out so we don’t have to show the aliens invade in full force? She gets konked out after the first aliens show up and wakes up after their initial assault, which feels less efficient than it does uncharacteristically cheap. But once Sam awakens and the film enters survival horror mode, it settles into a good rhythm.

Sarnoski, who also wrote the film, uses the urban setting to his full advantage, taking us on a tour of Chinatown, Harlem, Manhattan, and the subway and streets between them. Some of the franchise’s best sequences are in Day One, from a chase through a finance district to a tense pursuit through a flooded subway tunnel. He makes sure to follow every chaotic alien attack sequence with a long stretch of character development, building sensible peaks and valleys amidst the carnage and horror.

The Cat In This Is Such A Good Boy

Nyong’o carries the film effortlessly with a sort of blasé attitude, and Joseph Quinn is a standout as her apocalyptic wingman. But the real standout is the cat. Frodo the cat is the secret ingredient that makes the whole film work.

Unwilling to lose a valuable cat role in Hollywood to computer animators, Sarnoski heroically fought the studio to hire a real cat. Two cat actors (cactors, if you will) named Schnitzel and Nico scored the role, their breakthrough performance in Hollywood. Their job, Sarnoski said, is not to react to the creatures and the danger around them, but rather to just exist. The human actors’ jobs are to sell the horror and the peril.

Since Frodo the cat is a passenger on Sam’s deranged pizza quest, the film often adopts his perspective to ground us. Frodo carefully walks across settled dust and broken cars, effortlessly navigating this destroyed city. These sequences define A Quiet Place: Day One — in monster movies, the end of the world is less a dialogue-driven affair than it is a visceral experience. Frodo’s scenes wordlessly communicate the scale of Sarnoski’s apocalypse.

A Quiet Place: Day One Uses Every Trick In The Book

As much as I respect Sarnoski’s character-driven, thematically rich approach to the sound-sensitive monster movie, I think A Quiet Place: Day One also betrays the limitations of its premise. The creatures don’t evolve throughout the three A Quiet Place films, and we learn precious little about their motivations and their species. Since they hunt by sound, the worlds of the three films are necessarily silent, but the movies don’t build much upon that foundation. There’s not much room to build. The foundations of this series impose limits on how the world operates so fundamentally that the only innovations Sarnoski — or anybody, really — can make come down to character and plot. A Quiet Place: Day One explores as much new territory as its limited premise allows, and even then, you can recognize the barriers, feel the world groan under the weight.

The apocalypse in these films is miserable, too. A Quiet Place and its sequel are fun, well-oiled scare machines, but the characters in those films feel like they’re living despite the murderous sound aliens roaming the planet. They’re resilient and hopeful. Sam and friends in A Quiet Place: Day One lack that optimism, instead inhabiting an eerie, uncertain gloom. It ain’t The Road, but it’s not far off either. Nyong’o and Quinn are certainly affable, energetic performers, as are Schnitzel and Nico, but Day One is missing the slightly cheesy sanguine magic that Krasinski brought to his duology. It’s well-directed and incredibly well-performed, but your summer tentpole monster movie is kind of a bummer, dude.

Conclusion

There’s more to like with A Quiet Place: Day One than not. I got to watch New Yorkers ripped apart by the dozens by aliens, which scratched an itch buried deep in my New Jersey soul. Djimon Hounsou got a paycheck for the four lines of dialogue he says in this movie, so good on him. Trade publications also reported that this production narrowly avoided an all-out strike from the movie cat union, ICATSE, whose members were demanding guarantees that their jobs were not replaced with AI and their craft service tables were provided with all the Greenies they could want.

A Quiet Place: Day One was released on June 28, 2024!