Movie review: 'Quiet Place: Day One' familiar, still fun
LOS ANGELES, June 27 (UPI) -- With the third film, A Quiet Place: Day One, in theaters Friday, the franchise settles into a method for extending its gimmick indefinitely. This is still fun, though less significant than the first two entries.
Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) is living in hospice. Her nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff), takes a group into New York on the day that aliens attracted to sound arrive.
Sam is trapped in the city and quickly figures out that silence is the best defense against the monsters. Day One becomes a series of sound-based suspense sequences, which is fine.
A franchise about how making noise can kill you can be just as fun as the Freddy, Jason and Chucky entries exploring clever ways those killers can terrorize new victims. Or, the Saw films, with new traps and the Final Destinations, with deadly set pieces.
So Sam has to cross a room littered with broken glass. The survivors can work really hard to prevent a big noise from attracting the monsters, only to be done in by a small, mundane noise.
Opening a can of food proves to be a problem. Characters may create decoy noise to pull the monsters away from the survivors' destination.
A Quiet Place has the budget to stage such set pieces in New York City, or at least a convincing recreation thereof. Sam sneaks down abandoned streets and high traffic throughways, while the creatures scale skyscrapers.
One effective sequence is not even sound-specific, but Sam hides under a car. When the tires start to deflate it becomes a ticking clock for her to escape and find a new hiding spot.
What Day One is missing from the first two films is a deaf character whose whole family could communicate via American Sign Language. Focusing on new survivors gives A Quiet Place new accouterments, but they're less special without the deaf/ASL angle.
Sam crosses paths with Eric (Joseph Quinn), who emerges from the subway. They try to communicate with looks, which would be how most hearing people would have to adjust.
Day One gets into the human stories of Sam and Eric along the way, but it feels more obligatory than the family drama of the first two films. Day One just needs to give them something to do to justify the monster fun.
Henri (Djimon Hounsou) from Quiet Place: Part II was also in New York with his wife and son on Day One. The prequel still leaves one wanting to spend more time with him.
Making Sam a terminal patient introduces other potentially interesting drama, but the film only follows it in the most conventional directions. The fact that Sam is not going to live either way could be explored more.
Surely, the human survival instinct remains whether it's the will to survive for another week or several years. Certainly, instant death by monster still seems worth avoiding, despite the pain Sam still endures from her medical condition.
The crisis does not dramatically change Sam's outlook on her fate. It gives her a goal within the city, but only to the extent she now has freedom from supervision, for better or worse.
One plot device of Day One might contradict Part II but it would be a spoiler to discuss.
The premise of A Quiet Place is compelling enough that sequels can continue to tell standalone stories of survivors in different regions. They'll become increasingly familiar with each entry, but some will also rise to the challenge to distinguish themselves like in all franchises.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
