What Some People Won't Do for a Slice

Film: A Quiet Place: Day One
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

When A Quiet Place came out a few years ago, I thought it was a really interesting take on a basic horror story. It’s not the main plot that is different, but the details. Having creatures that hunt entirely by sound created a different sort of danger. Any movie that pits humans as essentially prey animals will have its tropes; focusing them differently makes for a different experience. The sequel was decent as well and built on the lore. Naturally, I was curious about what the prequel, A Quiet Place: Day One was going to add to the lore of these alien invaders.

The sad truth is that, aside from getting a few really good looks at the creatures, we’re not actually going to get a great deal. A Quiet Place: Day One is a pretty standard monster movie in a lot of respects. There’s a huge amount of destruction, lots of people get killed, and we follow the survival attempts of a few people hoping to make it through alive. Since this is a prequel, we’re going to know some things about the invading creatures that the characters won’t. We know that they hunt by sound, for instance, which is something we’re going to have to see our characters discover. Because of that, even the joy of discovery of the particulars of the creatures is denied us.

We’re going to get a couple of minutes of set up. Primarly, this is going to introduce us to Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient living in a hospice just outside of New York City. One day, she is convinced by nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff) to go to the city and attend the theater. She’s not too happy when she finds out that “the theater” is a marionette show, but she got Reuben to agree that they would get legitimate New York pizza before heading back to the hospice.

What’s going to happen is exactly what you expect—the aliens arrive and start attacking the city just as the cancer patients are leaving the theater. All hell breaks loose and, because we’ve already been following her up to this point, we can rest assured that Samira (and her cat Frodo) are going to survive this initial onslaught. She does, eventually waking up in the puppet theater in the company of Henri (Djimon Hounsou). They overhear announcements telling them to stay hidden and stay quiet, and to eventually to head to the South Street Seaport, since the creatures can’t swim.

Sam, however, is determined to get pizza. No, really—that's the plot here, so while a crowd of people are silently moving to the seaport, Samira is moving in the other direction. She eventually encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn), a British student at school in New York. Eric has survived a flooded subway tunnel, and has emerged into the new, devastated New York. Not really knowing his way around, he decides to follow Samira on her quest for pizza.

What follows is exactly what you expect is going to happen. Sam and Eric are going to look for her pizza, they deal with Frodo the cat running off at times, and they also deal with Sam’s need for meds, harder to come by since they are not at the hospice and since it’s not like there are any open pharmacies in the middle of devastated New York.

Any horror movie lives or dies on the audience wanting the characters to be safe and to survive. We have to care about Samira and Eric for the movie to work, and it’s not really hard for us to do that in general. This is true even when the characters on screen make really dumb choices. The fact that Samira is a terminal cancer patient doesn’t change us wanting her to survive, but it does affect how we view what happens and her reactions to what happens. Going to find pizza in the middle of the city being devastated by aliens is an objectively stupid decision, especially when it means walking against the crowd heading to safety. That she is dying makes it slightly more understandable. It eventually turns out that she wants to go to a specific pizzeria—again, that she’s dying makes this slightly more understandable, but still pretty dumb.

The most disappointing thing about A Quiet Place: Day One is how completely unnecessary it is. As the audience, we don’t learn anything really about the creatures aside from the fact that they appeared to arrive in what look kind of like meteors. We get a better look at them. Beyond that, this is just a placeholder, and that’s really disappointing.

Why to watch A Quiet Place: Day One: You get a really good look at the monsters.
Why not to watch: It’s really just a monster movie, and you’ve probably seen it before.