Here’s a trick question:  How do the aliens in the A Quiet Place franchise arrive on Earth?  The answer is…we don’t know.  In the sequel and this prequel, all we are shown is streaks of light tearing across the sky.  The assumption is that they arrive in space ships, but neither film gives us any indication of what those look like.  For a typical alien invasion movie, seeing the alien spaceship(s) is the money shot–think Independence Day, War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Amazingly, three movies into this franchise, the alien’s mode of transport is still a mystery.

This is due to how the A Quiet Place films have been less about the invasion and more about its effect on everyday people.  In the first two movies, we focused on the Abbotts, a family in upstate New York who successfully adapted to their precarious new normal.  In Day One, we follow two new characters who meet on a very consequential day in Manhattan.  The first one we meet is Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), who lives at a hospice care center with her emotional support cat Frodo.   She’s a prickly pear, but when you’re dying of a terminal disease the people around you forgive your prickliness.  For example, when she reads an expletive-laden poem during group, sympathetic nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff) is cool with it and claps.  He later invites Samira to a show in the city with some of the other patients.  Samira declines at first, but she reconsiders when he agrees to stop at Patsy’s in Harlem for pizza.

Much to Samira’s chagrin, the “show” is a puppet show.  I wonder if they actually have anything like this in Manhattan today or if it’s a bit of wishful thinking on behalf of writer-director Michael Sarnoski.  No matter, because the show is subtly beautiful, until it reminds Samira of her impending death.  Samira leaves to get a candy bar at a local store ($4, New York prices) and walks back to the bus.  When she asks Reuben about going to Patsy’s, he says that they can’t and must leave ASAP due to an incident in the city.  Samira gives him a curt response that she regrets but takes her seat.  On the bus, her fellow seniors drift to the back to observe the commotion outside.  Samira joins them but is knocked unconscious by an explosion.

Samira wanders out of the bus in a daze and finds that the city has become a recreation of 9/11.  There’s dust everywhere and it’s impossible for Samira to see anything.  People are screaming and appear to be under attack by creatures.  Another explosion knocks Samira out again, and she awakens inside the theater.  Samira awakens in a panic but is calmed by Henri (Djimon Hounsou).  That evening, she and several others watch jets destroy the bridges connecting Manhattan with the state.  Now Samira, along with everyone else, is now trapped with vicious creatures who want to kill them.  Henri tries to keep someone from talking, but it goes terribly wrong.  That innocent puppet show we saw earlier now seems like it happened in another lifetime.

The creatures eventually are drawn to the theater and Samira takes to the street with Frodo.  Helicopters tell citizens to make for the river, where rescue boats will be waiting.  (The military has figured out that the creatures can’t swim, so score one for the men in uniform.)  Unfortunately, a large group of people walking can’t help but make noise and the creatures attack.  After being separated from Samira during the mayhem, Frodo encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn) emerging from a flooded subway stairwell.  He’s in the throes of a panic attack, but the sight of Frodo calms him down.  (The performance by the cat is perfect in this movie by the way.  CGI animals are just never convincing, sorry.)

Frodo leads Eric to Samira, and she has him break into her apartment.  The onset of a storm allows them the chance to scream, a cathartic moment that horror movies rarely indulge in.  Samira tells Eric about her plan to go to Harlem for pizza.  He’s incredulous at first, but then grasps why when he reads a poem Samira wrote that describes her rapidly diminishing time.  Samira tries to ditch Eric in the morning, but Eric locates her on the street admiring books.  (I love how this movie expresses a genuine love for tangible things.)  Samira realizes that Eric  sees her as the eye in the storm and begrudgingly lets him tag along.  As the two head for Harlem to fulfill Samira’s dying wish, both they (and the audience) already know that the journey will be no walk in the park.

What struck me about A Quiet Place: Day One is its compassion and empathy.  Even though the world has disintegrated and is filled with lethal aliens, this movie (and the previous entries)  believe that people–for the most part–will resist anarchy and instead be nice to each other.  Writer-director Michael Sarnoski, who initially seemed an odd choice for this film, has made franchise founder and producer John Krasinski look brilliant in hindsight.  Sarnoski, who directed the exceptional Pig with Nicolas Cage, brings the same rawness and poignancy to this movie.  Day One may be an epic alien invasion film, but Sarnoski uses that framework to craft a heartfelt character study inside it.  Throughout the film, Sarnoski shows us even though all may be lost, aspiring lawyer Eric and the terminally ill Samira choose to help each other because they are fundamentally good people.  They may die a horrible death at any moment, but that’s no excuse for not being decent and kind to each other.

As for the aliens themselves, they are the same reliable source of tense moments and jump scares as before.  I wish they were more interesting looking, like the horrifically stylish aliens in the Alien franchise (for which this franchise is heavily indebted).  Instead they remind me of the aliens of Edge of Tomorrow and The Tomorrow War, whirling CGI creations that are mostly kept at a distance or at the edge of the frame.  While we do get a couple of disgusting “open up and say ahh” closeups, the aliens mostly look like animated shish kebabs.  The movie does provide clues as to why there are so many of them (hint: some are resident aliens.)  I wonder how long this franchise can continue to tell us next to nothing about the beings who want to kill us at the drop of a pin.  Eventually there will be an entry that reveals something important about them, but after three movies I’m guessing it won’t happen anytime soon.

Sarnoski is fortunate to have two exceptional actors who effortlessly keep the horror at a personal level.  Academy Award-winning Lupita Nyong’o shows incredible emotional range here, shifting between world-weary cynicism and wide-eyed terror in the beginning.  Then, when the movie settles into an “end of the world” melancholy, Nyong’o proves why she is one of the best actresses to ever grace a horror movie.  Her expressive face and eyes communicate the emotional context of every scene so convincingly that I’m convinced the movie would have worked perfectly with no sound at all.  As the relocated Brit Eric, Quinn is disarmingly sympathetic as a man who has to overcome his paralyzing fear to become a friend of circumstance.  Although their acting styles are distinctly different, Nyong’o and Quinn’s pairing is surprisingly believable and touching.  A Quiet Place: Day One may be about the arrival of homicidal aliens in New York, but it’s also a story of how the worst situations call upon our shared humanity.  That the movie conveys this message so earnestly, without a hint of irony, is a credit to everyone involved.  Expertly crafted and superbly acted, the movie is one of the best films of the year.  Highly Recommended.

Analysis

Although I did find the horrific parts of A Quiet Place: Day One to be suitably horrifying, what I keep coming back to are the scenes without monsters present.  In those other scenes with just Samira and Eric, we see them act with kindness towards each other, even though they only just met.  Given how the world appears to be coming to an end, there’s no reason for them to act as they do.  That they do so regardless of what’s happening around them speaks to the movie’s underlying humanism.  In other words, when someone you know is hurting, you’re there for them.

Consider Samira.  She’s dying from terminal cancer and relies on Fentanyl patches to function.  In the beginning, she loathes being around other people and resists Reuben’s effort to get her out of the hospice center.  She only acquiesces when she realizes that she can make one last stop at the pizza place she used to visit with her dad.  Then, when Reuben tells Samira they can’t go due to trouble in the city, she tells him that he’s a nurse and not a friend.  Reuben is hurt by her comment but brushes it off because he has to get the group on the bus as quickly as possible.  Samira regrets what she says and probably figures she’ll apologize to him later, and they patch things up when they are sheltering in the theater.

After the initial onslaught, Samira’s true nature reveals itself.  She seeks out Frodo despite the chaos, even though she could have left him behind.  She gives her candy bar to two kids hiding in a fountain and directs them to join the others walking to the rescue boats.  (That doesn’t end well for them, but Samira had no way of knowing that at the time.)  Later, she calms Eric down from a panic attack and lets him stay at her apartment for the night.  Sure, she leaves him behind the following morning, but her actions aren’t malicious.  She knows that if Eric follows her, he would be going away from safety.  She leaves him because she is forcing him to do what he should do.  Eric, however, decides to ignore his own needs and chooses to safeguard Samira’s journey instead.  If today will be her last day on Earth, he wants to do what he can to make it a good one.

What binds Eric to Samira is more than simple kindness, though.  Now that he understands that the trip represents Samira’s dying wish, his empathy and compassion make it impossible for him to ignore its significance.  While it would make more sense for Eric to find his way to the boats, helping her get to Patsy’s is the only way he can repay her while she is still alive.  Even though Eric knows she will die regardless, he is embodying what some would describe as “the better angels of our nature”.  

That philosophy, for lack of a better word, comes through when Samira and Eric finally arrive at Patsy’s.  Unfortunately, it has been reduced to a burnt-out shell.  Eric knows how disappointed Samira is to be denied what she wanted, so he thinks on his feet.  Eric has Samira take them to the jazz club where she and her father used to go and he leaves her there to search for pizza.  He returns with a box of stale, day-old pizza and writes “Patsy’s” on the cover.  The pizza is still edible, and Samira’s smile conveys how grateful she is to Eric for making the trip memorable.  Then, to top things off, he performs a card trick for her.  The scene is beautiful and touching, and it made me forget that the two are experiencing first hand both an alien invasion and an existential threat to humanity.  

I suspect that Day One would have been just as effective without the aliens and had instead taken place during an ecological disaster.  That aside, the scenes in Harlem represent the beating heart of the movie.  Samira and Eric, two people who couldn’t be more dissimilar, found each other amidst the crisis and chose to stick by each other throughout.  I’m not sure if I can call how Day One ends as hopeful or optimistic, but the movie’s underlying belief in the inherent goodness of humanity is a message that I can get behind.

About those aliens

Back in 2012, a prequel to Alien named Prometheus was released.  The latter provided a modicum of insight into the alien creatures that have gnawed and slashed countless human beings in four movies and two crossover movies (with the Predators).  One revelation in Prometheus was that the aliens are possibly biological weapons.  The idea that the alien creatures are weapons was touched upon in Alien, when science officer (and android) Ash (Ian Holm) states that the corporation asked him to safeguard the delivery of the aliens back home.  When asked if he admires the aliens, Ash admits that he does admire their efficiency.  He’s certainly right.  The creatures are extremely difficult to kill, because of their strength and armor.  In Aliens (1986), we see that they are also extremely fast and filled with acid, so that even when you harm one, you may end up mortally wounded in the process.

I don’t know if writer-director John Krasinski was directly inspired by the Alien franchise when he came up with the idea for A Quiet Place (2018) but the parallels are unmistakable.  As with the Alien films, the creatures in the AQP movies are fast, strong and extremely efficient killing machines.  I was surprised when Day One tipped its hand and made a direct reference to Alien.  When Eric stumbled upon the nest of a large creature tending to eggs, I immediately thought of the eggs in the Alien movies.  The purpose of the eggs in Day One is left ambiguous, however, since Eric gets out of dodge as soon as he secures Frodo.  The creatures seem to be eating the eggs, but I’m honestly not sure what that scene depicts.

I read an article where director Sarnoski says that the pools of pink goo in that scene  also contained human body parts.  I admit that I didn’t notice that detail, but this answers the question of what the creatures in APQ subsist on.  In the previous movies, dead bodies litter the landscape and I assumed that the creatures didn’t eat their victims.  So the mystery of what the AQP creatures eat has been solved.  As for how and why the creatures came to Earth, I guess I’ll need to wait for Day Two to arrive.