Director: Michael Sarnoski
A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel to the 2018 film A Quiet Place by John Krasinski where parents struggle to raise their children in a world occupied by extraterrestrial blind creatures with ultra-sensitive hearing. A Quiet Place: Day One returns to the first day of the invasion and how it all started.
In A Quiet Place: Day One, a young woman called Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is terminally ill and lives in a hospice outside of New York City. Her nurse tries hard to convince her to go on an excursion to NYC and he manages to get her to agree to go by promising they will go to the area where she grew up and have pizza at Patsy’s which she frequented with her late dad as a child. He takes the whole hospice group to a doll theatre and promises to go and get pizza later, but an apocalypse happens with an alien attack. The attack happens during the play, which initially causes confusion as the balloon in the play explodes and not everyone immediately notices this is something else. Slowly, but not too slowly, the story unravels and it is an alien attack. They don’t see but they have ultra-sensitive hearing so humans have to be quiet. There is beauty portrayed in this film about quietness with Sam, the main character, talking about listening to the city and the wind and its natural sounds without traffic and the normal, rushed way of life.
Sam is Black and has a cat she keeps with her in hospice and takes on an excursion to NYC, and throughout the apocalypse, she keeps saving her cat. The cat also runs away or wanders away but always returns to her; thus, the film shows a beautiful connection and a bond cats form with their keepers. I absolutely loved that the main protagonist of the film is a Black cat lady, and this bond is portrayed beautifully. Along the way, Sam also meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), an English law student who has nowhere to go because his parents are in Kent so he stays with Sam, against her wishes and refuses to go to the water himself, advice given by the authorities because attackers cannot swim.
Sam and Eric end up forming a beautiful, silent friendship and they whisper and write about who they are. Eric goes and fetches the medicines Sam needs, almost getting killed along the way but gets saved by Sam’s cat who bonded with him instantly and who shows him where to climb up, so he and the cat survive the attack and bring meds to Sam. The pair then tries to make it to Patsy’s where they enjoy an old pizza, which Sam fetches from what appears to be another pizza place, but he writes Patsy’s on a pizza box and they have it in Patsy’s where they also have a silent play with Eric showing card tricks and creating a beautiful card performance with Sam, but obviously silently. There is beauty in this silence and the ability of humans to transform and adjust to new conditions while still seeking what fundamentally makes us human, a connection, an interaction and a bit of fun.
There is also beauty in colours when towards the end of the film, Sam gives Eric what turns out to be her father’s yellow jumper. In those scenes, with New York City being shattered, dark and grey, we see also bits of beauty when Eric wears Sam’s yellow jumper and Sam wears her red hat. I was wowed by these scenes and thought they were beautifully made with a contrast between grey and dark as destitute and yellow and red as hope.
The whole film is well done with great acting, effects and lightning, and the human element and the bond between humans and cats are beautifully portrayed along with already mentioned contrasts of colours portraying despair and beauty at the same time. I was frozen when watching these contrasts and soaking those scenes in and the only film that ever made me stop like that is American Beauty and the scene with a plastic bag in the wind.
The scene in A Quiet Place: Day One is nothing like American Beauty with the colours of clothes against the dark and grey, shattered city but it is the same super creativity of a director that makes you stop for a few seconds and reflect on life and all the beauty we take for granted. Today, when sitting outside in my garden, I watched shades of green on trees and appreciated them more than I normally do.
Beautiful! Inspired! A Quiet Place: Day One is one of the best films I’ve watched in a long time. Watch it!
Thank you for reading!