DAN WEBSTER:
It’s not exactly a common movie plotline, but A Quiet Place: Day One involves a story about a character’s determined quest to accomplish a task before facing the inevitability of death.
Not common, sure, but not exactly unheard of either. Take D.O.A., a 1946 noir starring Edmond O’Brien as a man who’s been poisoned and who has only a few days to discover who wanted him dead… and why. That plotline proved so popular, in fact, that it’s been remade no less than four times.
The film A Quiet Place: Day One offers a variation on the same theme one in which the main character indeed is dying. We first meet Samira (played by Lupita Nyong’o) in a New York hospice facility. Seems she is enduring some fatal form of cancer, and her attitude is as grim as her prognosis. A published poet, she reveals as much in the poem that she reads to her therapy group, which is marked by a repeated use of the familiar four-letter S-word for feces.
As for her task, Samira discloses to her hospice nurse Reuben (played by Alex Wolff) that she’ll go on a planned day trip into Manhattan only if they can stop along the way and get pizza. And, yes, her mission doesn’t have quite the same intensity as trying to solve a murder, especially one’s own murder, but then Samira doesn’t have much else to hope for.
Especially when, suddenly, the world is shaken by invaders from the skies. The third offering in the A Quiet Place franchise, Day One follows the original 2018 episode (directed and co-written by John Krasinski) and the 2020 sequel (again directed and co-written by Krasinski).
This latest film is directed by Michael Sarnoski, from a script that he co-wrote with Krasinski (who’s listed as a producer). And while it has a whole new cast (with the exception of Djimon Hounsou, who made a brief appearance in A Quiet Place 2), it features the same spider-predator-type alien creatures who have, unaccountably, come to Earth as little more than simple destroyers.
The single thing that allows humankind to survive involves the aliens’ inability to see (and as we find out an inability to handle water). It’s only through sound that the aliens can target their prey.
With her cat Frodo in tow—she calls him her “service cat”—Samira is caught up in the initial invasion, able to survive by chance, through help from others and by her own enduring brand of smarts, even as thousands of others get mowed down around her.
Pretty soon she encounters Eric (played by Joseph Quinn), a law student suffering from shock. At first, she tries to dissuade Eric from following her, encouraging him to head to the river where he might be able to catch a rescue craft. But befuddled Eric insists on sticking around, and so the two plod on—Eric because he doesn’t know what else to do and Samira because she’s intent on reaching a spot in Harlem that holds particular meaning for her.
Sarnoski proves to be every bit as capable as Krasinski in handling the action sequences, even if the alien threat feels less personally threatening, and far mindless, than those featured in either the Alien or Predator franchises. And, too, he knows how to capture moments of intimacy, whether they involve Samira’s resentment concerning her disease—which causes her, at least initially, to resist any connection other than with her cat—or Eric’s growing transformation from a frightened, needy cipher to someone willing to risk death to help a friend.
And that’s true whether that friend is Samir or her cat, Frodo, who ends up having far more of a role in Day One than, say, Ripley’s cat Jonesy does in the original Alien.
What we’re left with, ultimately, in A Quiet Place: Day One is Samira, ably played by Nyong’o, a 2014 Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave. It seems only fitting that, finally having accepted the fate that life has handed her, which ends up being the point of her hero’s journey all along, that Samira should find a sense of peace—even in the face of certain death—while listening to Nina Simone sing about “Feeling Good.”
Which just proves that films can be meaningful—and ironic—all at once.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.