There are enough interesting ideas and at least two confident performances holding \u201cA Quiet Place: Day One\u201d together, even if it sometimes feels like a first draft of a richer, more complex final film. \u201cPig\u201d director Michael Sarnoski proves deft at the kind of melancholic, subtle character beats\u00a0usually lacking in these blockbusters. But he lacks the skill set for action, an\u00a0essential aspect of a film like this: the setpieces feel too imprecise, and the stakes never high enough to produce actual tension. Still, what could have been a cash grab clearly has loftier aspirations, resulting in a film that\u2019s never boring and just provocative enough to spark big questions about what truly matters in this world when it\u2019s falling apart.<\/p>\n
The always-great Lupita Nyong\u2019o plays Sam, a hospice stage cancer patient who agrees to a trip into Manhattan for a show with her support group, led by a bearded Alex Wolff (who also starred in \u201cPig\u201d). The puppet show they attend is fine, but she\u2019s really there for a slice of NY pizza, knowing that it\u2019s likely the last time she will have a chance to taste something she so clearly associates with happiness. Making Sam an end-stage cancer patient adds an interesting layer to the horror that unfolds. How hard do you fight to live when you\u2019re already dying? It\u2019s only one of several intriguing ideas that Sarnoski\u2019s film walks up to but then runs away too quickly, retreating into the thin structure of a survival thriller. <\/p>\n
Another big question is, how do you silence one of the loudest cities in the world? Sarnoski\u2019s film informs us that NYC is regularly 90 decibels, setting the stage for a movie about how a city filled with that much hustle and bustle stays quiet. But this isn\u2019t that movie. We never get the sense we\u2019re in a crowded city on the first day of the end of the world, as Sarnoski can\u2019t hide that his film didn\u2019t shoot in Manhattan (it was shot on London soundstages). This makes it feel more like sets than a lived-in reality. <\/p>\n
We follow Sam and her movie-stealing cat, Frodo, through this landscape until they\u2019re joined by a panicking young man named Eric (Joseph Quinn of \u201cStranger Things\u201d). Casting Nyong\u2019o and Quinn proves half the battle with \u201cDay One,\u201d as their extremely expressive faces are forced to do a lot of heavy lifting as the sound-sensitive aliens take over the world around them. They both give strong genre performances, conveying most of the story through pure\u00a0physicality and expression. <\/p>\n
The problem is there\u2019s too little story to tell. Early on, we meet Henri (Djimon Hounsou), a character from \u201cA Quiet Place: Part II”; he gets one of the best scenes in the movie as a man goes into a panic attack in front of him and his son. What would you do? How far would you go to silence a man who might put your family in jeopardy? Would you kill him? It\u2019s a beat that gets a nice callback later when Eric\u2019s panic starts to rise, and we wonder if Sam may have to ask the same questions, but it feels too shallowly developed. Almost every thematic aspect of \u201cDay One\u201d feels hurried, a pace that could be why the once-attached Jeff Nichols left the project over creative differences. It\u2019s hard to believe in the era of bloated blockbusters, but this one should have been longer; its 99 minutes don\u2019t allow for enough character investment, world-building, or actual tension. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are enough interesting ideas and at least two confident performances holding \u201cA Quiet Place: Day One\u201d together, even if it sometimes feels like a first draft of a richer, more complex final film. \u201cPig\u201d director Michael Sarnoski proves deft at the kind of melancholic, subtle character beats\u00a0usually lacking in these blockbusters. But he lacks …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[48,51,37],"class_list":["post-1393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction-movies","tag-horror","tag-science-fiction","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}