I couldn’t decide if I liked A Quiet Place: Day One or didn’t like it after I saw it. That’s not a great place for a critic to be.
The third entry in the Quiet Place franchise introduces us to Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a young woman with cancer who is living in hospice outside New York. One day, she is convinced to go into the city with her friend/nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff) for a show, as long as they can get pizza in the city before they come back to the hospice. She is very concerned that the pizza be eaten while they are still in the city.
They get to the show, and Sam is disappointed when she discovers the show is a marionette show. Whatever; she will still get her pizza. Before the show even ends, Reuben gets a phone call, insisting they come back to the hospice immediately – no pizza. It is mere minutes before the sky is filled with the aliens who are bombing the city and grabbing anyone who dares make a sound.
The military is there, warning people to keep quiet and go towards the bay for transport to evacuation centers. Sam still wants her pizza, assuming this will be the last chance she has for it before her death, so she heads up to Harlem. Along the way, she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), who ignores her dismissals and follows her until she relents and takes on a companion.
Director Michael Sarnoski does a great job directing a limited story. There are plenty of good scares that aren’t purely jump scares (though most of the scares are jump scares). I actually care about the characters. Making Sam a cancer patient was a good choice; it made her insane hunt for pizza at the end of the world understandable. It is nice to see characters helping one another. No one becomes selfish; there is no murdering of humans in other “groups.” Plus, Sam has a cat in the film (don’t worry; the cat lives). I’m not a cat person, but this was one damn cute cat.
However, during the movie, I couldn’t help but wonder: what does this add to the Quiet Place mythos? Nothing, really. We don’t learn anything new about the aliens. We don’t even learn how the government knew that sound was the thing that made you unsafe. The plot was limited. For example, early on in the film, Sam meets a couple of children. She offers them a protein bar, which they devour in a moment, like they haven’t been fed in days. It is Day One of the attack; unless they don’t have a guardian to cook for them, I have to assume they ate breakfast. It felt like a scene that was added to beef up the runtime.
I saw the film in IMAX and I have to say, it did nothing for me. There was nothing special about the framing that made the bigger aspect ratio better. The sound was, however, far more effective in a theater. The loud vs. soft sections were much more pronounced, even though some of the whispering between characters was almost impossible to understand over the background noise.
Ultimately, the movie was fine. It’s nothing that you will be thinking about after you walk out of the theater, but the runtime did move well and I didn’t feel bored. I think it would be more effective in a theater, so try not to wait until streaming for this one.
