My daughter wanted to see this one, so I took her to the theater. Marketed in previews as a fairly typical horror movie, A Quiet Place, Day One was surprising in that it took a turn about halfway through to focus on the developing friendship between two characters, and forgetting for about forty-five minutes that it was supposed to be scaring us. I think it may turn out to be one of those rare movies that I would rate highly as a film on its own terms, but that suffers under our horror grading rubric. We shall see.
It’s also a sequel to a movie I reviewed previously, A Quiet Place, which I rated very highly. In fact, that first movie in the series landed in the “Best Horror Movie Ever” category. I believe there was another sequel before this one as well, but I haven’t seen it.
In any case, A Quiet Place: Day One doesn’t have any of the same characters as the first movie, except the invading hostile and ravenous aliens, who are blind but have extremely sharp hearing. Hence the high concept of the films–the need for all the characters in the movie to be as quiet as they can all the time, if they want to live. Let’s see how that plays out this time around.
Sam is a patient in a hospice with an unspecified illness, but one painful enough that she wears a morphine patch. She’s the youngest patient in the building, and none too happy with her fatal disease, reacting to questions in her therapy group with cutting sarcasm and reading a poem that insults the other group members. She always carries her cat, Frodo, with her wherever she goes.
The therapist in charge of her group, Reuben, wants to take the group members on a trip to see a show in New York City. Sam’s not interested at first, until she’s able to convince Reuben that they should get pizza in the city afterward. When they arrive on the hospice bus, Sam is disappointed to find out the show is a marionette show. During the performance, she gets up from her seat and heads out to the street outside, Frodo still in her arms.
While she’s outside, streaks of fire cross the sky and some sort of alien pods strike the city, including one just down the block. A cloud of dust rises up and envelops everything. (This to me is a deliberate visual reference to the 9/11 attacks in New York.) People run screaming in and out of the haze, and Sam sees an insect-like alien creature with long arms grab a screaming person and drag him off. There’s a stampede of people and Sam is knocked unconscious.
When she wakes up, she’s back in the partially wrecked marionette theatre. As soon as her eyes open, someone grabs her and clamps a hand over her mouth. Dozens of hushed refugees watch with concern to make sure she doesn’t scream. Viewers of the first movie know that the people have already realized that any noise above a whisper brings a fatal alien attack. Somebody is holding Frodo and gives the cat back to her. Sam goes to the roof and observes military jets bombing the bridges connecting Manhattan to the mainland.
That night, hovering helicopters with loudspeakers announce that evacuations from Manhattan will begin at the South Street Seaport the next day. Everyone starts trudging in that direction as quietly as they can, whole avenues full of silent people. Of course, not everybody can stay quiet all the time, and small accidents that make noise cause horrific attacks on the crowds by hungry aliens. Sam, however, heads uptown, against the crowd. With her fatal disease, perhaps it’s just not worth it to her to join the others?
Gradually the crowds thin out. But during one alien attack, Frodo runs off. A man hiding in the water of a flooded subway station observes the cat and follows it back to Sam. The man, Eric, is dressed in a dirty suit and tie and insists on accompanying Sam, much to her annoyance. What possible reason could he have for refusing to leave her side? They reach Sam’s former apartment and stay the night. A thunderstorm breaks out, providing sound cover for them to converse and learn each other’s stories. It turns out Sam was a poet before she contracted her disease and is headed to Harlem to visit her favorite pizza parlor growing up. Eric was a law student from England whose carefully planned life has now been upended.
The next day, Sam is in great pain because she’s run out of her medications. Eric leaves the apartment and searches an abandoned pharmacy to get her the medicine she needs before they continue their journey through the city, mostly (but not completely, as we learn) emptied of humans. Will they make it together to Harlem, or will one or both of them (three of them, if you count Frodo) get snatched by an alien? And while Sam, only weeks from death, may not find it worthwhile to leave the island, what about Eric? Will he manage to find escape and safety?
A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
Story/Plot/Characters— Acting is uniformly excellent, especially Lupita Nyong’o’s performance as Sam. The script is well thought-out and the plot coherent, although in a movie where talking can get you killed, the dialogue is necessarily limited.
Characters are believable and sympathetic. Indeed, the film veers from horror movie territory at about the halfway point and becomes more of a study of two isolated characters without much in common, Sam and Eric, as they develop an odd friendship under extreme pressure. Of all things, it reminds me a lot of Midnight Cowboy. In horror movie terms, it’s almost as if the characters stuck in a haunted house ignored the ghosts and started a deep discussion about how their life choices had brought them to this point. Not unwelcome, but from a commercial and genre point of view, it’s an unusual choice.
One questionable logic point in the movie did have me scratching my head and takes a notch off the rating. Sam and Eric are in Harlem in one scene, then a scene later are trying to flag down a rescue boat which we know from earlier in the movie must have recently left from the South Street Seaport. But those are on opposite ends of Manhattan, and the movie’s already made a point about how difficult and time-consuming it is to cross the city on foot with monsters hunting you. How did they get across the city so fast?’
The other thing is that the gimmick of quietness is no longer novel, as it was in the first movie. The script still does a lot with it, and it’s welcome to see a movie with long scenes with almost no sound, as opposed to the usual non-stop aural assault you get in most modern films. But still, it’s no longer a surprise, and the movie reuses some of the same tricks as the first film (for instance, the characters can speak around running water like a fountain, because it masks their noise). The idea isn’t quite stale yet, but it’s not as fresh as it once was. (3 points)
Special Effects— Fine for what they are, although nothing we haven’t seen before, either in this movie series or others. The aliens are basically ripped off from the Alien movies, and there are the usual explosions and flipped cars flying through the air we’ve seen in a million action and superhero movies. (1 point)
Scariness— Here’s where the rubric works against the film. A few scares early on, but at the halfway point, the movie switches gears and doesn’t even try to scare us again until the end. Works fine on the level of general film, but this is a horror movie review site, and considered strictly as a horror movie, I have to take points off. (.5 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness— Some great eerie scenes–avenues streaming with people all perfectly quiet, a ruined church with sunlight shafting through its broken roof, an empty office building, an abandoned and flooded subway station. (2 points)
Total=6.5 points (Pretty Good)
Like Jaws or The Bad Seed or probably a few others I can’t think of right now, a movie that rates better as a general film than when strictly considered as a horror movie. It makes an unusual choice for the genre, choosing to fully develop its characters with an intimate look at a developing friendship, rather than focusing on the scares. In some ways, it has more in common with something like Midnight Cowboy than with your typical horror fare. Certainly well-made, and some viewers will appreciate it, but many horror fans will be disappointed.