And we’re back. It’s time to nut up or shut up, as Jesse Eisenberg once said facing his zombie clown fears. Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn are faced with the same choice on the day Earth went quiet. A Quiet Place: Day One finds a new inroad to this world that’s almost as captivating as the first. This movie’s gonna make bank, and if the following ones are as well put together as Day One, I’ll be delightfully waiting for future installments, a rarity in diminishing returns IP land.
Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is drifting through life in hospice care, accepting of her fate to die quietly. Convinced to go on a trip by nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff) into Manhattan in exchange for pizza, Sam agrees to see a puppet show in Chinatown. This also happens to be the day that all the horrifying creatures from the first Quiet Place choose to land on Earth, essentially beginning the apocalypse for Sam, her cat Frodo, family man Henri (Djimon Hounsou), and Kent immigrant law student Eric (Joseph Quinn), and the rest of the planet at large.
The setting change really helps Day One not fall into sequel hell. Instead of the rural quiet of the first two films, this one takes place in gigantic Manhattan, filled with all sorts of humans and noises…new ways to be scared by the quiet. The first arrival is particularly creepy: with a dust cloud fog hiding Sam’s vision as she walks through the panicked New York streets. Michael Sarnoski keeps us on the ground with the scared residents of NYC, but when he needs to go big, he gets some great moments, like a horrifying shot of the bridges around Manhattan, or an even more scary shot of the creatures flying up city buildings like the worst insects of all time. The overqualified Lupita Nyong’o navigates us through this terror, using that incredible expressive face to convey all the feelings we need to feel without saying a word at all.
And that’s where Pig director Michael Sarnoski shines brightest. I did not expect that I would be emotionally moved by Day One because of how floored I was by the first Quiet Place. But the minute Joseph Quinn shows up, he and Lupita Nyong’o develop this wonderful emotional shorthand between the two of them, telling a story without words. There’s a scene in a jazz club that got me choked up, though the pair’s wonderful chemistry and Sarnoski’s sneaky great score. The movie becomes the Gandalf treatise: “All you have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to you.” as Sam and Frodo and Eric (don’t remember him in LOTR) figure out what their lives will be in this dark, new reality…and if they want to be a part of it at all.
A Quiet Place: Day One is a great recipe for franchise success. Take the essence of the original film, and translate it to new characters and new places. Plus, hire a great director to make the project work. And there’s no doubt Michael Sarnoski is a great director: he got Nicholas Cage in the woods with a truffle pig and made some high art out of it. Surely he was gonna do the same with a giant budget, Lupita Nyong’o, the Stranger Things guy. That’s shooting movie fish in a barrel.