‘It’s good to have been back…’
For any franchise to survive it must evolve. Particularly a horror franchise and particularly in 2024. Gone are the days when you could just throw Jason at a different group of teenagers every October and watch the money roll in. A Quiet Place II is a solid sequel but another film along those lines probably would have signalled the end of the franchise. A Quiet Place: Day One is a departure from the two films that preceded it and it’s all the better for it…
As promised by the title, we witness the beginning of the alien invasion that led to the events of A Quiet Place. The temptation with every sequel (or prequel in this case) is to go bigger. While there are some impressive large-scale set pieces here, the story is told entirely through the eyes of Samira (Lupita Nyong’o) – a seemingly lone survivor on the streets of New York City (although she does also carry around an inexplicably well-behaved cat). Eventually, Samira encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn), another survivor, and the two form an unlikely but intimate bond.
Writer-director Michael Sarnoski (Pig) draws from the Nick Offerman episode of The Last of Us by telling an intimate story in the midst of a global collapse. We see more of the creatures this time (dubbed ‘Death Angels’ in the official lore of the film) and they are, to be blunt, fucking terrifying. A combination of spiders, xenomorphs and something cooked up in the Upside Down of Stranger Things, the scene in which they descend on downtown Manhattan is truly breathtaking in both scale and visuals – a sequence that suggests that Sarnoski has a long future at the helm of future blockbusters. It helps that Nyong’o brings such an authentic humanity to her role as a troubled mental patient who must decide how much she wants to stay alive and it’s also handy that her and Quinn are a good fit together. His still and mostly silent performance suggests a nuance that he never had the opportunity to express on the aforementioned Stranger Things.
A Quiet Place: Day One is not just a successful sequel but it is also proof of concept that there are still many other stories to be told in this universe. In a world in which long-running horror franchises are few and far between, Sarnoski’s prequel has paved the way for future entries.
