A Quiet Place: Day One lives up to the first movie by doing something radically different
polygon.comA Quiet Place: Day One isn’t so much a spinoff and prequel of John Krasinski’s 2018 horror movie as it is a riveting drama that plays in the series’ sandbox. You can spot the odd bit of new world-building here or there, about just how and why there are so many damn echolocating aliens, but these tidbits are just background noise (shh, not so loud!) to a much more interesting human story. A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II are rural sci-fi horror, but Day One — from Pig director Michael Sarnoski — moves the setting to New York City and crafts its story in the vein of large-scale disaster cinema. It’s likely the best Manhattan mayhem film since Cloverfield, and it’s also a downright excellent Hollywood blockbuster, if an entirely unexpected one.
A first-time indie filmmaker being subsumed by the studio system can be cause for concern — it’s usually a sign they’ve been hired to execute a board room’s vision — but A Quiet Place: Day One has Sarnoski written all over it, as a genre filmmaker who finds emotional resonance where most might not think to look. Pig, which initially seemed like “John Wick, but with a chef and his beloved sow,” proved surprisingly thoughtful in its unraveling of grief, a sleight-of-hand gambit that applies to Sarnoski’s horror threequel, too. Day One is as much about confronting oblivion as it is about confronting aliens, for reasons the movie’s seemingly omnipresent trailers have avoided revealing.
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When Day One opens, its lead character, the former poet Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), is wasting away in a hospice facility, frustrated
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