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. (read the rest of this shit…)
