“Kite Man: Hell Yeah!” Season 1 Review 
“Bad River” (2024) Review 
“Speak No Evil” (2024) Review 
“The Deliverance” (2024) Review 
“Rebel Ridge” Review 
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” Review 
“A Quiet Place: Day One” Review 
“The Union” (2024) Review 
The origins of the alien monsters from A Quiet Place don’t sound that interesting. The creatures are more compelling for their towering physical forms and attraction to sound. Day One, thankfully, doesn’t try to provide answers to questions nobody asked. Instead, this prequel takes the route of a side story by switching up the setting and characters and leaning heavier into action.
This first day of the alien invasion is set in New York City, the least quiet spot for avoiding aliens attracted to noise. Among those fleeing the carnage is terminally-ill cancer patient Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), someone who hasn’t found much to live for in life besides poetry and pizza. But with lives on the line and a cat to save, her fearful survival instincts kick in as the monsters start chowing down on human flesh. She’ll find an unlikely ally with Eric (Joseph Quinn) as the two try to find their way out of the city, crawling with aliens that hunt through sound and die in water.
While the previous two Quiet Place movies relied on more of the tensions of keeping quiet in the country, Day One embraces the more action-packed hallmarks of an apocalypse movie. Noise crowds the screen as jets fly overhead, cars explode, and monsters skitter down skyscrapers. Sam has to pull double-duty for this adventure, where she’s expected to stay quiet and run for her life. She’ll also have to save her pet cat, but, honestly, the cat seems to handle this deadly event with the least amount of stress. A more intriguing film might be about what happens when the humans die off and only the cats manage to survive in a world of monsters.
The most appealing aspect of this film is that it doesn’t require any foreknowledge or fill-in-the-blanks of the Quiet Place movies. The most that film features is the return of Djimon Hounsou’s character from Part II, but there’s not much else. Having a fresh batch of characters thrown into this scenario makes the film easy to come into cold. While Sam and Eric are not given nearly as much time to be as enduring as the Abbott family, they’re given just enough personality and problems to hope they’ll find the next boat out of the city. That said, many of their quieter moments don’t pack as much of a punch, where their encounter has little difference from the therapy session Sam attends in the opening.
Despite the lack of equally compelling characters, this film makes the smart call to lean into its action. There are some decently exciting sequences of Sam navigating her way through panicky people and dashing through a building with aliens crashing through every window. The monsters get some gruesome close-ups and still look intimidating for the many scenes they have in daylight. I was, however, more interested in expanding the intrigue of these beings. Having the aliens hunt the country for sound was brilliantly tense, but wouldn’t they be confused and overwhelmed if there was too much noise in a place like New York City? It’s a compelling question, but a movie on this level would probably reduce it to something less fascinating like weaponized sounds, ala Mars Attacks.
Day One has just enough action to make this Quiet Place side story decently distinct. It doesn’t try too hard to match the horror of A Quiet Place 1 and 2, which is probably for the best for avoiding the saga becoming too derivative. Nyong’o’s performance is strong enough to carry the picture with her cynical demure and terrified expressions perfectly suited for horror. It’s also just a cool sight to watch her walk the streets of a decimated New York City with a cat by her side (and, yes, the cat lives). The ending also ends on a note that ensures this is more of a self-contained story than a new ensemble’s continuance. Perhaps that’s the best direction for these films to take; finding decent detours around the presence of the man-eating creatures more frightening in the dark than explained in the light.
