A Quiet Place: Day One - Review Thread

A Quiet Place is one of the more successful franchises that Parmount Pictures almost certainly wants to keep going with regularity but director John Krasinski is too busy making weird CGI imaginary friend movies to make a proper Part 3, so what’s a studio to do? Prequel spinoff, that’s what. To make it they’ve employed Pig director Michael Sarnoski to make a film set in New York City right at the onset of the invasion that would eventually cause the post-Apocalypse we see in the first two films but centered around mostly new characters. The logline that was almost certainly used to sell this movie to executives was “this will be the Aliens to A Quiet Place’s Alien,” a movie that uses the threat from a horror movie and uses it to more direct and in your face form of thriller that borders on being an action movie. This doesn’t go quite as far as Aliens in that direction in that we never have the humans picking up guns to fight back against the monsters, but it does have the feel of a full monster disaster film more so than a suspense movie about unseen enemies. In particular it definitely borrowers a vibe form the 2008 New York set monster disaster film Cloverfield, while obviously eschewing that movie’s found footage format. This isn’t a terrible idea but I’m not sure the execution was all there. Occasionally the film will present the audience with some pretty decent set-pieces and there’s decent disaster imagery to be found, but it’s not really doing much that hasn’t been seen before and the suspense execution is spotty. But the bigger problem with the movie is that its characters and their motivations are kind of weak. The movie centers on a woman named Samira (Lupita Nyong'o) who’s in the late stages of terminal cancer and who finds herself in the midst of this chaos and has much different survival motivations than the people around her and eventually she randomly meets up with a dude named Eric (Joseph Quinn) who decides to hang out with her. This relationship, I think, is the biggest problem here. Eric’s motivations in clinging to this lady never really rings true and he’s introduced a little too late and is just a little too bland to really endear himself to the audience. That Michael Sarnoski directed this is curious. There are some aspects of the script that seem to be attempting the same kind of humanism he displayed in his debut film and there are a couple of quiet scenes that do reflect his sensibilities but I’m not sure he ever really finds the right balance between this material and the more conventional action; he kind of tries to go all in on action in the first half and then sneak the humanism in late, but without proper set-up it never really lands and as such the movie never quite works. However, I don’t want to come down too hard on this. At worst it’s a near miss and it does have its moments and there are certainly worse thrillers out there.