Screens/Movies

Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 99 mins.
When: Fri., June 28
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: A Quiet Place: Day One is better made than the previous two instalments and contains the best movie cat in a long time.

PREQUELS are generally considered a bit of a narrative dead end. Thus, A Quiet Place: Day One tries to find a bit of a workaround by removing the Abbott family of the first two films from the equation. The past two films in the science-fiction horror series seemed like a coded attempt by writer/director/star John Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt to ruminate on the family unit. Furthermore, being bloodless, PG-13 iterations of the genre, they represented one of the horror movements in recent years to shift from pessimism to the mawkish, four-quadrant audience-chasing genre gentrification of sorts.

This is to say that perhaps a fresh start for this series is welcome. The new lead, Samira (Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o), is introduced as a hospice resident doing group therapy, in which her jaded personality becomes very apparent. We do see she has a bit of a soft centre, though, as she’s aided by a support cat (as a feline lover, the presence of this furry friend made Day One by far the most emotionally resonant of the three Quiet Place films). Of course, a trip to Manhattan for her group is interrupted by the arrival of human-eating aliens who are drawn to sound, leading to a good portion of the runtime being characters lifting a finger to their mouths to go “Shh!” so as not to draw their attention.

Focusing on an individual character (plus her cat) through the usual Quiet Place setup seems like an interesting direction, especially since the film is anchored by Nyong’o’s strong physical performance. Leaping into the alien invasion rather quickly, it initially seems to lean into developing Samira’s character by showing instead of telling. But if initially fixed within her point of view, the film compromises by introducing a secondary character, a law student from England, Eric (Joseph Quinn), who becomes her co-fighter for survival amidst the attempt to escape from New York. Through him, there’s more of a sounding board for her to reveal traumatic backstory regarding her parents (a film about being quiet still needs some excuses to have characters yap and yap).

Replacing Krasinski in the director’s chair is Michael Sarnoski, who made the acclaimed Nicolas Cage indie Pig a few years ago. The scale of this film is often closer to blockbuster than the previous two, with drone shots of the New York cityscape and computer-generated explosions, but Sarnoski manages to create more memorable images than usual; the desolate metropolis is often genuinely eerie through strong production design and patient camerawork, even if there are still tired stabs at suspense through the “don’t make any noise” setup sprinkled throughout the relatively concise runtime.

However, the problem ultimately is its grim and cornier impulses are seemingly at odds with each other. For that reason, the film isn’t a totally satisfying venture, even if the filmmaking on the whole is stronger than the two previous instalments. Also, personally speaking, this writer has never found the basic mechanics of the series terribly interesting or scary. For one, the creatures are more goofy than menacing; there are a number of closeups (the murky cinematography often not helping matters) of their surfaces and insides that don’t add much to the pursuit of making them the new iconic movie monsters. Ultimately, A Quiet Place: Day One often feels like the best possible iteration of something that doesn’t really work in the first place.