(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you have had the hushed, if terrifying, pleasure of sitting through either A Quiet Place or A Quiet Place 2, you will be well aware that this is a franchise with one eye very much on the humanity of what it means to be plunged into and somehow survive an horrific apocalypse.
Whole other franchises might zero in with box office padding intensity on the “bang!” and the “boom!” of such a scenario, and yes, to be fair, apocalypses are usually (though not always) by their very nature, noisily disruptive affairs, the A Quiet Place series has always been happy to serve up thrills and spills with a sizeable focus on what it means for the people involved.
That was readily apparent in the first two films which focused on how the arrival of sightless aliens known as Death Angels in massive meteorite showers destroyed life as we know it and forced families like the Abbott family to make some almighty sacrifices simply to survive.
This willingness to put the humanity of such a scenario front and centre reaches its zenith in A Quiet Place: Day One, likely the best in this incipient series which surely is slated for endless expansion in the years ahead, which takes us all the way back, as the title suggests, to the day everything went south for humanity.
While we saw some parts of that day from the Abbotts’ perspective back in the second film, Day One goes all in, showing in almost real time what it would be like to have a normal busy, chaotic everyday world reduced to rubble and ashes, and silence, of course, in a stockingly short period of time.
And it does it so effectively, and with a such a sharply empathetic focus on what it would be like to (hopefully) live through such a nightmarish ordeal, that you could see yourself caught alongside the main characters, those that survive at least, as they realise that the world has irrevocably changed and that if they are going to survive, they must do so SILENTLY.
Day One centres on terminally ill cancer patient and onetime published poet Samira aka Sam (Lupita Nyong’o who is in superlatively nuanced and deeply affecting form) who is on a trip to the theatre in Manhattan with others from the hospice (and her gorgeous cat Frodo, played by Nico and Schnitzel; no CGI felines here, thanks to the insistence of director Michael Sarnoski) where she fully expects to live out the end of her days, when almost instantly brutal alien invasion happens.
The change from civilisational surety to utter ruin and destruction happens astonishingly fast with the aliens essentially hitting the ground running and devouring everything in their path.
Somehow Sam and her nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff), and a bunch of other people including Henri (Djimon Hounsou), who you will know from the earlier films, and his family survive, sitting in dust-covered, stunned silence as the ponderously heavy but startlingly fleet-footed aliens rage with ruthless efficiency outside.
In a matter of hours, minutes really, New York City, known for its hustle and bustle, and chaotically frenetic energy, is reduced to a shell of its former self, and in the aftermath of the attack, people are urged by the military to get to a particular pier for evacuation when it is discovered the Death Angels can’t swim.
While Day One sees Sam initially swept into the tide of thousands of people shuffling relatively quietly down the main arteries to waterborne salvation, she has one wish and one wish only, her intentions skewed by the fact that she knows she’s going to die anyway, whatever happens – to get back to Harlem and get some slices from her favourite pizzeria.
It may seem like a whimsical decision, but Sarnoski’s powerfully thoughtful and and quietly emotional script, and a understated powerhouse of a performance by Nyong’o, invest so much meaning into her quest that it quickly becomes movingly emblematic of humanity’s fight for survival in a way that all those people moving with one determined mind towards a wharf could never be.
Sarnoski chooses emotional intimacy and truth over bombastic epicness and it works an absolute treat, turning Day One from what might’ve been just another mindless alien end-of-the-world epic into something which absolutely rips out your heart and makes you feel everything in some truly poignant, heartfelt ways.
Sam is joined on her mission to go home one last time by terrified English law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) who is the face of all those people who just want to LIVE.
It seems like an impossible wish given how many aliens are swarming over the ruins of the city but when he meets Sam, who initially wants to be left alone to see out her final journey in peace – and given how quiet everyone has to be to avoid becoming Death Angel chow, that seems entirely doable, actually – he finds not only a fellow survivor who can help him fulfill it but a higher purpose to simply just not dying.
They make the unlikeliest of journeypeople but their growing bond, which finds expression in loud action scenes and intimate moments together (of the platonic kind; this is strictly a friendship only deal) – including one scene in a bar which is beyond touching and beautiful and which will have you crying, especially when you see what follows – becomes the beating emotional centre that of Day One and it’s their mutually supportive closeness, and its soul-searing expression in the film’s tremendously affecting final act, that means while the terror doesn’t go away, it is somehow easier to bear.
A Quiet Place: Day One, easily one of the THE films of 2024, is absolutely brilliant, mixing taut, pedal-to-the-medal action with real emotional intimacy, leaving you feeling like you are living through the end of the world with all of the trauma, loss, sorrow & desperate scramble that would entail with two people who are wondrously alive and connected in ways that will own and never surrender your heart even as the world they once knew dies in screams and silence around them.