An early draft of this review was originally published on July 15, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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Even more than the alarmingly lifelike special effects, even more than the searing screams and concussive explosions of the sound design, it’s Lupita Nyong’o who makes us believe that all hell has broken loose in New York City in A Quiet Place: Day One. She is so good here — as usual — at making us believe in, and share, her desperation, that I found myself wondering about how she does it. Is she drawing from genuine feelings of desperation that she will only ever get leading roles in movies where her character suffers terror and trauma?
She is upsettingly compelling in such roles, so it’s easy to see why filmmakers want her front and center for such stressful dramas. But I would love to see her as the lead in a romantic comedy, or in a historical drama that isn’t about slavery.
Anyway — here she has the spotlight for the unnecessary prequel to John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, and she does a good job cultivating an unexpected protagonist — Samira (or “Sam”). Samira wins our sympathy as a struggling and despairing cancer patient with a therapy cat named Frodo (because what else would anyone named Sam name their cat?) She shows spirit in her antagonistic exchanges with a nurse (Pig’s Alex Wolff), insisting so fiercely that he help her get a slice from a very particular pizzeria that we know there’s got to be a revelation around the corner.
But when her quest for pizza is interrupted by the most chaotic alien invasion since Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, she becomes even more compellingly desperate—for survival and, yes, strangely, for the pizza.
While the movie takes its inevitable turn into a sequence of terrifying encounters with aliens who are as violent as they are relentless, we might settle into a familiar formula, dashing and dodging our way through a video-game-like obstacle course. And it seems almost predictable that Sam will pick up an unwanted companion who she can’t seem to shake.
The companion who complicates Samira’s quest is a panic-prone English law-school student named Eric, played by Joseph “No, I Am Not Related to Robert Downey Jr.” Quinn. Quinn made a name for himself as Eddie Munson in the fourth season of Stranger Things, but I would never have recognized him as that guy. He’s very good here in an emotionally demanding role that could easily have turned the audience against him as an unnecessary drag on Sam’s chances for survival.
And then there’s Frodo the Cat, who takes all of this concussive trauma as if it’s just another day in New York, cooperating impressively whether being led on a leash or being carried around in a bag or being held tightly be a person swimming in an underground tunnel.
When the movie surpasses expectations by giving us many quieter moments of surprising nuance and human kindness along the way, Nyong’o does her best work. The actress seems as determined to give her character as much human complexity as possible in the brief opportunities that the movie gives her. Little by little, Day One becomes a movie not so much about aliens as it is about two very different people who, forced to rely on each other for survival, will come to respect and even save one another.
There are good reasons to see this movie: the aforementioned performances and, of course, the quality of the special effects.
But downtown devastation movies have been a dime per dirty dozen for a long time now, and I’m beyond bored by them. If anybody ever comes up with a narrative in this franchise — or in this genre — that really engages me again, I will be astonished. This franchise, like so many others, so heavily prioritizes scenes of “shock and awe” devastation that it’s hard to contemplate any implications the human drama might have. (Is the Sam and Frodo reference supposed to incline me to read this as a story about faithful companionship in a world erupting with orcs and destruction, and then a melancholy boat sailing away to the Gray Havens?)
I fully respect critics who do their best to read real substance here (like Andrew Welch, who almost persuades me here.) And I’m still willing to give films in this genre a chance, as I did for Michael Sarnoski here. (I owe it to him for his sublime work in Pig, one of my favorite films of this decade so far.) And I think he makes the scenes of human intimacy as substantial as anything I’ve yet seen in the series. But just as I did with the first two, I staggered out of the theater glad that the movie hadn’t run longer, and suffering from another concussion headache.
And I’ve got to note that, given all of the energy that the film invests in a hopeful vision, the gut-punch of its final shot leaves me boggled, flushing away a lot of the goodwill the film has earned to that point. (You’ll have to see it for yourself.)
Hopefully Sarnoski will earn enough for this that he can make something as surprising, as absorbing, and as human as Pig again.