A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.

You see, it opens in a hospice somewhere outside New York City, where Sam (Lupita Nyong’o, NON-STOP) is grouchily living out her last days. We see a little bit of her life before the aliens, but at that point she’s already dealing with a different apocalypse. Before that she was a poet, daughter of a jazz pianist, we don’t know much else. Now she’s funny but kind of a bummer, anti-social, disruptive of the peace. A friendly nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff, HEREDITARY) seems worried about her, is trying to nudge her out of her grim mood by convincing her to come on the weekly field trip to see a performance in the city. He bribes her with a promise to get pizza afterwards, and she brings her cat Frodo.

But when there are streaks across the sky and vague word spreading about an emergency in the city, Reuben tries to gather everybody up to leave early. No pizza. And this is very upsetting to Sam. It’s all so silly in the big picture, except not in the bigger picture. She’s gonna die anyway. She wants pizza.

Disaster hits. She gets separated from her group. There are close calls, reunions, plans of escape. Eventually, announcements are made to travel south for evacuation, and the people who are still around form a silent herd. One of the film’s best images is Sam navigating through the middle of the crowd to head in the opposite direction, trying to get to her favorite pizza spot in Harlem.

You know, I never got around to seeing A QUIET PLACE: CHAPTER II. I know there’s a character in this (played by Djimon Hounsou, ELEPHANT WHITE) who connects to that, but I didn’t feel like I was missing any information. I remember part 1 being an impressive movie, I’m not saying this is a subversion, but it’s cool that they hired an interesting writer/director – Michael Sarnoski of PIG fame (sharing story credit with John Krasinski) – and really let him take a different approach. The first movie was about, among other things, families sticking together and the fear of trusting outsiders. I like this covering a very different perspective, a person who has no family left, other than the community of her hospice, and she’s kind of a loner anyway. The first one was about creating a comfortable life for your family out in the country, this is about appreciating the beauty of the city. And most of all about appreciating life while you can. Usually this genre is about doing what you need to do to survive. Sam just wants to do something nice for herself while she can. Small stakes, and yet huge.

Of course the urban setting also allows for different set pieces than the first film – getting trapped in revolving doors, monsters dropping through the glass ceiling of an office lobby. More people, vehicles, machines, hiding places. But it really feels like the movie’s using the city less as a prop or an obstacle course and more as a love poem to a way of life. Sam has been holed up waiting to die and now she gets one last walkthrough of her apartment, her neighborhood, some places she used to go with loved ones. She realizes how much she missed it.

If you’re picky, there are many things that may challenge the ol’ suspension of disbelief. Any time somebody accidentally causes a little clank a monster shows up immediately, but somehow everybody can be impossibly quiet the rest of the time. Mostly this is narrative expediency – we understand how this works, we don’t need to watch the characters learn it through trial and error again. But I found myself wondering if a crowd that big really wouldn’t make a sound at all and then I remembered being in anti-war marches where, when it got quiet enough, you could hear all the feet shuffling. An amazing sound. Anyway you have to accept that this whole group will be disciplined enough not to freak out and whimper or something. Or especially that her cat would never hiss at these monsters, let alone the mouse he chases in one scene.

(Afterwards I read a pretty great explanation for why the cat never hisses or arches his back. Reportedly he was supposed to, but you can’t train cats to do that, and Sarnoski neither wanted to scare the cats or use CGI ones, so he wrote it out.)

There’s a pretty cool part where Frodo wanders off and the camera follows his adventures for a bit. I would love even more of that. He crawls into a place where we see secret backstage alien shenanigans no one else knows about. And he finds Sam a companion – a law student from England named Eric (Joseph Quinn, OVERLORD) who’s totally panicked about being out of his element and latches onto Sam, much to her annoyance.

I remember in the first movie laughing at Krasinski’s awkwardly expositional newspaper headlines and dry erase board. I figured the evidence that this takes place in the same world is that signage will have, like, HOSPICE or JAZZ CLUB in giant letters and the rest of the title so small you can barely read it. That’s not a serious complaint, but this is (EMOTIONAL SPOILER): late in the game, Sam reveals a specific sentimental reason for her pizza mission. It’s okay, they get some good emotion out of it, but it undermines what to that point had hit me so hard about the movie: the idea of appreciating simple, beautiful things about the world so much that, in this scenario, they’re worth dying for. To me, giving it a backstory makes it less meaningful, not more.

Still, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is a good movie, a nice time, an admirable endeavor. Good looking, too – same cinematographer as PIG, Pat Scola. Its pleasures are simple, but not superficial. Poetic even, like its protagonist. When I saw the trailer for it (way too many times) I did wonder if it was kind of a waste of time for a great actress like Nyong’o, but no, I think it makes good use of her talents. You get charisma, you get attitude, you get action, you get heartbreak. Many layers to it and she does all of them better than just about anybody. Godspeed Sam and Frodo, I’m glad we spent day one together, viva la pizza.