A Quiet Place: Day One Review: Thriller Fails to Capture the Best of the Franchise

HENDERSON, Ky. (WEHT) – A Quiet Place: Day One is the third film in the Quiet Place franchise, which began with John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018); however Krasinski is not in the front of or behind the camera this time around. Michael Sarnosky takes the reins with Krasinski getting a story and producer credit. In the Quiet Place world, aliens have invaded Earth, and they attack anything that makes the slightest sound, often killing their victims ruthless and quickly.

A Quiet Place: Day One is essentially an origin story, charting the day the monsters arrive in New York City. Lupita Nyong’o stars as a hospice patient who goes into the City on a day trip, and once the monsters arrive she is determined to travel uptown to get pizza. Joseph Quinn and Djimon Hounsou co-star as people she meets along the way who are also trying to survive the alien attack.

What A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II (2020) did so well was combining resonant themes with tense action sequences. Thematically, they were movies about hope. Specifically, A Quiet Place is about natalism, the belief that having children is worthwhile, and we see this in the family that has a baby even as the world is ending around them.

A Quiet Place: Day One is about accepting fate. Nyong’o’s character is a cancer patient who has resigned herself to death, and the journey for pizza is basically her coming to terms with her own mortality. This is a departure from what we’ve seen the previous Quiet Place movies, and despite Nyong’o’s excellent performance, it doesn’t resonate quite as well.

Not only that, but A Quiet Place: Day One doesn’t fulfill the promise of the premise. The logical pitch for this movie is seeing how the humans come to understand the rules governing the monsters. How do we determine how limited their sight is and how keen their hearing is? Why are they invading Earth? Like Signs (2002), this is another movie about aliens who hate water invading a planet composed mostly of water, but how did we figure out any of those idiosyncrasies? We don’t get any of that, and instead of showing the large-scale chaos that would be involved in the destruction of New York – potentially the deaths of 1.6 million people in only Manhattan – we get action sequences similar to what we saw in A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II .

Except these action sequences are worse. There’s a scene with a generator, and instead of attacking the noise-making generator when it first comes on, the monster waits until there’s a tiny ripping of a character’s clothes before springing to attack. It defies the established rules of the world in favor of a cool horror movie beat.

Ultimately, much of A Quiet Place: Day One will work for fans of the franchise, but it’s undeniably a step down. Everything from the themes to the action beats to the structure (one supporting character arrives too late and another supporting character is forgotten for too long) is just a little bit less effective.

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