A Quiet Place: Day One
There are enough thought-provoking ideas and two confident performances at the center of “A Quiet Place: Day One” for it to work as a first draft of what could be a better, more complex final film. “Pig” director Michael Sarnoski has an uncommon touch with these blockbusters in terms of mood, but lacks the skill set for action that this kind of movie demands: the setpieces are too imprecise, and the stakes never high enough to generate any actual tension. Still, it’s clearly trying to be something other than a cash grab, resulting in something that’s never dull and just interesting enough to raise big questions about what really matters when everything falls apart.
Always great Lupita Nyong’o plays Sam, an end stage cancer patient who agrees to go into Manhattan for a show with her support group led by a bearded Alex Wolff (also in “Pig”). The puppet show they attend is fine, but she’s there for the slice of NY pizza she knows it’ll probably be her last chance ever to taste something she so strongly associates with happiness. Making Sam an end stage cancer patient adds another layer how hard do you fight to live when you’re already dying? It’s one of many ideas that Sarnoski’s film comes up next to but then runs away from too quickly, retreating into the thin structure of a survival thriller.
Another question is how you silence one of the loudest cities in the world? Sarnoski tells us NYC averages 90 decibels regularly; he sets up a movie about how such a bustling city stays quiet. But it isn’t that movie. We don’t feel like we’re in a crowded city on the first day after the end of days so much as we feel like we’re on soundstages in London (because that’s where they shot his film does not hide that it did not shoot in Manhattan). So it feels like sets, rather than a lived in reality.
We follow Sam and her movie stealing cat, Frodo (seriously), through this landscape until they’re joined by a panicking young man named Eric (Joseph Quinn of “Stranger Things”). The casting of Nyong’o and Quinn is half the battle with “Day One,” as their faces are extremely expressive, and need to be as the sound-sensitive aliens take over the world around them. They give strong genre performances, telling most of the story physically.
The problem is that there’s not enough story to tell. Henri (Djimon Hounsou), a character from “A Quiet Place: Part II, ” appears early on and has one of the best scenes in the movie as a man has a panic attack in front of him and his son. What would you do? How far would you go to quiet a man who could put your family at risk? Would you kill him? It’s a beat that gets a nice callback later when Eric starts panicking, and we wonder if Sam may have to ask herself the same questions, but it feels undercooked.
Almost every thematic aspect of “Day One” feels rushed possibly why former director Jeff Nichols left over creative differences and it’s hard to believe in the era of bloated blockbusters, but this one should have been longer; 99 minutes doesn’t allow for enough character investment, world-building or actual tension.
Still, Sarnoski’s knack for nuance comes through in several beats. He guides Nyong’o and Quinn to very strong performances with almost no dialogue, but one wishes he had found a co-director who could give “Day One” more visual style and substance. When the aliens are doing their thing, “Day One” falls into an uncanny valley between realism and action; it never actually feels tense, yet it also never quite feels like a big-budget blockbuster. The minor beats in “Day One” kids hiding in a fountain to disguise their noise; Eric emerging from a flooded subway; a hand over a screaming mouth; Quinn & Nyong’o’s amazing eyes elevate it above creatively bankrupt sequels. This is not that. It’s too good for that cynicism. Just don’t expect anyone to defend it too loudly either way.
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