A Quiet Place: Day One

 I'm not that huge a fan of the Quiet Place movies. I liked the first one well enough - it's a well executed gimmick horror film - but I still struggle to buy into the premise: animalistic aliens that hunt by sound alone arrive on Earth in numbers high enough to bring our civilization to heel. I mean, you can defeat them by throwing a noisemaker and calmly walking in the other direction, right?

 A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel that hinges around events we've already seen in the best scene of the second movie in the franchise - the alien D-Day, the moment when the large humanoid mantis-things arrive in meteorites and start wreaking havoc amongst an unsuspecting populace. It moves the action to New York, and away from the family central to the the first two movies to a new cast.

 

 Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) is spending her last days as a terminal cancer patient in a hospice in New York with her cat Frodo (Schnitzel and Nico). She reluctantly agrees to go on a field trip to go see a show downtown, mostly because it'll allow here the chance to nip out and grab a slice of pizza. Sam is pretty big on pizza, for dramatic reasons that will become clear later.

 The show gets interrupted due to an unknown disturbance, and as the group starts boarding the bus, the meteorites hit the ground and the aliens emerge and start attacking everyone.

 Sam has a few close calls, bands in with other survivors as people quickly figure out that noise equals death, and then decides to strike out on her own on a suicidal quest for pizza. She then runs into a shellshocked British expat (Joseph Quinn) who insists on sticking with her, and as they travel together a tentative friendship develops between the two. 

 It's a simple, affecting story that focuses on the mundane elements and its relatable characters despite the constant alien threat. It helps a lot that the drama is a clear upgrade over the first two movies; I can certainly empathise more with an embittered, dying woman's rage against the dying of the light than with a couple whose act of defiance is to have a baby despite the fact it's probably going to doom their whole family. The minimalistic script does a lot of the heavy pulling, as does the always excellent Nyong'o, particularly expressive and intense here.

 Unfortunately, the aliens are much less convincing this time around; Their hearing and hunting skills, even when they do that cool move where they open up their head like a pinecone, vary depending on the script's needs... but as a rule they end up feeling incompetent to the point that whenever someone dies it feels like it's their own damn fault. A downgrade from the more effective hunters from the previous movies (which, to be fair, also had this problem, just to a lesser degree).

 The cat is also... well, it totally fails to behave like a real cat for some of its major scenes (including one particularly ridiculous bit where it would have sunk its claws up to its elbows in its poor bearer).

  On the plus side, the wrecked city scenery (hard not to think of 9/11) looks incredible, thanks to some beautiful visuals from writer/director Michael Sarnoski and cinematographer Pat Scola (who had previously worked together on the wonderful, and tonally similar Pig). They handle the requisite tense 'skulking around the aliens' scenes well, but I was more taken by their impressionistic focus on the details of the devastated city - a shoe poking out of the rubble, an abandoned basketball court, or the shuffle of a refugee crowd, all filmed in a style that felt to me indebted to Lubezki's work with Malik. Not bad for the second sequel of a horror franchise!

 Back on the genre side of things, the effects sell the mass of the aliens exceptionally well - in one particularly effective scene, the danger doesn't come from being hunted, but from being crushed by a fast-moving stampede.

 The sound design is also excellent, though that's probably a given with this series.

 I love this sort of thing: a (no pun intended) quieter, more experimental offshoot of an established genre franchise. Even better when it's put out by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes imprint. There's been a third a core quiet place movie in the works for a while now, but I'd much prefer more side-trips like this one.