A Quiet Place: Day One – Anxiety Inducing Doomsday Prequel [Review]

I have terrible anxiety. The years 2020-2024 have made that anxiety worse. We live in a tumultuous and tense time in human history. So naturally, people want to capitalize on that terror, that prime visceral anxious feeling with a movie like A Quiet Place. The first two films in the series are horror classics. Raising heart rates, and giving audiences the theatrical equivalent of a panic attack. A Quiet Place: Day One tells the story of how those alien beings got here. Just not really in the way you think. There aren’t any egghead scientists running around trying to figure out why they’re here, what they eat, why they’re attracted to sound, or anything. In fact, Day One might leave you with more questions than answers when it comes to these beings.

No, it doesn’t aim to provide really any explanation as to what these things are doing here. They’re just a tool in the film to provide for tense moments that otherwise wouldn’t be. The simple act of walking across the street goes from brisk and easy to terrifying and tense at a moment’s notice. The idea that these killer monsters are attracted to sound only gives the filmmakers more things to throw at audiences to ratchet up the tension. The first two Quiet Place movies did this with a precision that most horror movies cannot match. These monsters are Michael Myers on steroids, and there are hundreds of them.

The story here kicks off in the middle of Samira’s (Lupita Nyong’o) day. She lives in a hospice care facility with cancer. She’s clearly not liking her surroundings and she has a nurse who’s trying to at least make her time a bit better that’s played by Alex Wolff. They go to the city as a group with other patients to see a show and then the aliens attack. Oh, and she has a cat named Frodo, who steals every scene that they’re in. After the initial shock of the entire world coming down around her, she’s rescued by Henri (Djimon Hounsou). After a bit, she runs into Eric (played by Joseph Quinn) and they’re bonded together to help Samira get to Harlem.

From there, we get snippets of the destruction of New York City but never really any indication of how it’s going in the outside world. The military destroys bridges and fly over, telling people to get to ferry ships because the creatures can’t swim. Water is humanity’s best defense against them, whether it’s in a river or coming down from the sky as rain.

Water becomes a character in A Quiet Place: Day One. It lets the characters go loose for a bit when it’s raining, as their voices are muffled. Eric is petrified of water because of how he’s first introduced in the film. Later in the film, water rushing through subway tunnels makes it into an ally for the characters. It’s a fascinating choice by the filmmakers.

A Quiet Place: Day One doesn’t have the emotional resonance you’d like for a movie with a plot like this, but it also doesn’t provide enough scares or disaster set pieces for a straight-up horror or disaster movie. It feels like its juggling a bit too many things and should have gone one way or another. The biggest set piece in the film comes and goes rather quickly with Sam and Eric running through a massive glass building trying to escape the aliens.

The film’s emotional weight only really shines through in the third act. The motivation behind Samira trying to get to Harlem and not the hell out of New York hits hard, but not for very long. Once the thread of the film is unraveled for the audience to enjoy, it’s over.

Some of the jump scares in the film are also just played off cheaply. There’s one in particular that is just glaring and there simply for a cheap scare. The monsters overall, are terrifying though. You get to see more of them in Day One than in the first two films. Normally that makes things less scary, but the illusion and confusion of their motivations isn’t shown here.

Even with those detractors, A Quiet Place: Day One still shines though. Joseph Quinn is fantastic as Eric giving one of the more relatable performances in recent memory. Normally, you still get a bit of action movie star-ish behavior in these types of films, but he’s down to Earth, and the dude even has a panic attack while these events are going on.

The animal actor who plays Frodo the cat gives the best performance in the film. They’re part of some of the best laughs in the film but also some of the most tense scenes. It doesn’t bode well for the film that the audience was more worried about the cat’s livelihood than the people’s.

As someone who lives with anxiety about disasters, the world, and whatever else, A Quiet Place: Day One did make my blood pressure rise a bit. But it also gave a smaller scale story in the grand scheme of destruction that humanity could still shine through something so brutal and horrific.

It might not do the genre of horror or disaster great, but A Quiet Place: Day One doesn’t fall into the tropes of a prequel or giving away too much about the monsters at hand.

A Quiet Place: Day One releases in theaters on June 28th.

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