A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

I'm on my tear of PG-13 horror movies.  I didn't mean to do it.  I just did.  The scariness of Day One is probably on par with the other Quiet Place movies.  There are monsters that are terrifying to look at.  They're really good at jump scaring the crap out of you.  A lot more people die in this movie, especially considering that this is an origin movie to the apocalypse.  There's some language and the movie talks about mortality a lot.  Also, if you are claustrophobic, this might not be the movie for you.

DIRECTOR:  Michael Sarnoski

I'm so far behind in my work all around.  Sure, I shouldn't be prioritizing this stupid blog.  Yes, I have very real responsibilities that need to get done.  But I also know how my brain works.  The further I get away from having actually watched these movies, the less quality these blogs will get.  Couple with that the fact that I'm doing the thing that I don't want to do might make me be more productive in the long run.  Just let me have my own stupid mental crisis when it comes to writing blogs about movies that people stopped talking about a year ago.

I don't know why I want to apologize for having watched a pretty quality movie.  The A Quiet Place movies have a very specific place in the cultural zeitgeist.  They are movies that people see, aggressively talk about for a period of a week, and then forget about.  I don't mean to disparage John Krasinski nor the team surrounding the Quiet Place movies.  It just felt very weird for me to be writing a blog about a movie that came out in 2024 in 2026.  I was on an airplane and I regretted having never have seen it.  The thing is, this movie was almost foretold.  It is the natural evolution of this franchise.  The original A Quiet Place does one of those things that Predator does. (I hate that I keep coming back to Predator as a reference, especially after immediately finishing writing about Predator: Badlands.)  It gave us just enough info to understand that aliens had killed most of the population, giving us a nice intimate story about John Krasinski trying to save his family.  The second film tried mirroring the structure of the first film, but --at least from my perspective --failed to capture some of the magic and specialness of the first film.  Like with Predator 2, the movie feels the need to explain some things. 

I don't like Predator 2.  There's too much of an attempt to explain things.  I like things ambiguous.  Day One kind of does a nice job balancing new information while keeping things cryptic.  If I'm being more critical than I'd like to be, I have to say that nothing in Day One is really necessary.  If anything, it might be breaking some rules by having characters in the early days of the invasion figuring out stuff that Krasinski's family took a minute to discover.  Ultimately, we want to see the thing that we imagined.  I can't help but make the compirson to shows like The Walking Dead.  When a horror franchise starts in medias res, often the inciting incident is so bombastic that the filmmakers spark curiosity on how that might have looked.  Now, with the case of The Walking Dead, we got Fear the Walking Dead, a show that started by giving us an origin story to the apocalypse.  While there is some great Fear the Walking Dead out there, the show's early seasons showing how the apocalypse actually happened are...mid?  I really don't like dogging on things.  I remember that it took a minute for me to really get on board of Fear the Walking Dead before really liking it.  (And then it ended quite poorly, but that's a different discussion. 

But A Quiet Place: Day One kind of pulls it off.  I don't deny that a lot of it is spectacle.  It's very cool seeing New York going from normal to being quite terrifying.  But the cooler thing that kind of came out of it is the scale of the film.  The first two Quiet Place films are very contained.  Yes, we feel for the family because they are our narrators.  Instead, what we have is something more akin to a kaiju film or something like Cloverfield, where the city itself becomes quite scary.  And, for the first time, a prequel actually makes the monsters more scary.  Usually when you throw a bunch of a creature at something, it nerfs it. Because this blog is bound to get repetitive, it's the problem that I have with Aliens.  When there was one xenomorph, that thing was unkillable.  When you have a bunch, you can take them out left and right.  But with Day One, you can throw a bunch of these creatures into a packed city and, because we know that the heroes aren't going to solve the problem.  (Note:  I just looked up what the name of the creatures in A Quiet Place were called and fans call them "Death Angels."  I'm going to try to avoid that moniker both because it is, as of yet, non-canonical, and also it's a little emo for me.)  These things are still tanks because we are allowed to kill off characters.

And that's where the real genius of Day One lies.  By taking solutions off the table narratively, Day One has to do something different.  Heck, they even imbue its narrative into its character.  Sam is dying from the moment this movie starts.  In most of these alien invasion stories, the goal is to survive.  While a natural goal for a character, it also means that we've been seeing the same movie, in some form, over and over again.  But because Sam doesn't really care about survival (it's not like she's anti-survival.  It's just not her priority), we can examine what makes her tick as a character.  And the absolutely bizarre thing about her goals is that they are wildly high-risk, low-reward (a phrase I've now used in two blogs, back-to-back).  I love it.  Her goal is to get the last slice of pizza from her favorite restaurant before the world completely collapses.  Yes, the filmmakers know that there's more imbued in this slice of pizza  than simply the taste of a pizza (that, at best, will be cold).  No, we learn a lot about her character by the way she treats this goal.  Sure, it's a little emotionally manipulative to associate this pizza joint with her dead father. But you know what?  I love it.  It's a sotry that is characer driven instead of plot driven.  After all, we know that she can't make a dent against these aliens.  (I almost wrote it, guys.)  

And through that small goal, she learns something about herself.  I mean, sure, it is coming to grips with her own mortality.  But I feel like Sam starts the movie being wildly cool with death.  Instead, Sam's major conflict isn't seeing the place where her father played piano.  Nope.  It's the fact that she has been doing things alone too much.  The narrative spins Eric into her world.  Eric isn't competent.  He's not meant to be.  It's how we'd probably all be flailing given the circumstances.  But her holding a cat is such a wonderful understanding of how Sam relates to the vulnerable.  While the cat is a very good cat --almost too good!  How does it not meow? --it is almost more trouble than its worth.  After all, Eric almost dies saving the cat from itself.  But that vulnerability is the door for Sam to relate to people.  After all, her caretaker in hospice is almost her enemy.  She's rude and beligerant to him, even though he's only fighting for her best interests.  She can't relate to that.  But Eric?  It made her feel a sense of connection again, mainly because Eric needs to be taken care of.

I don't know.  I really liked it.  Like, it still suffers from that idea that I posted initially: this doesn't really have lasting power.  But watching it at the time?  Golly, this is a great scary disaster movie that is character driven.  That's really what makes A Quiet Place something to look forward to.  We care about the characters rather than simply look for the spectacle.  This movie works.  I liked it.