OVERVIEW
A prequel to the first two films, A Quiet Place: Day One moves the story from the rural Abbott farmhouse to New York City on the day the creatures arrive. Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient living in a hospice on the outskirts of the city, ends up in Manhattan when the invasion begins, and spends the film trying to reach a pizza place she loves before the island is locked down. Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, from a story he developed with John Krasinski. Joseph Quinn and Djimon Hounsou co-star.
BACKGROUND
The spinoff was announced in November 2020 with Jeff Nichols attached to write and direct, working from a story Krasinski had developed. Nichols completed his script and handed it in. By October 2021 he was gone, citing creative differences, and in January 2022 Krasinski approached Michael Sarnoski to replace him. Sarnoski had just made Pig, a quietly devastating Nicolas Cage film that cost almost nothing and earned enormous respect. The gap between that and a $67 million franchise entry is considerable, and Krasinski was betting that what made Pig work, its patience and its commitment to character over spectacle, could be transplanted into the Quiet Place universe.
The entire film was shot in London from February to April 2023, despite being set in New York. Warner Bros. Leavesden provided the backlot for four blocks of recreated Manhattan, including Chinatown and parts of Harlem. Paramount wanted Sam’s cat Frodo to be computer-generated; Sarnoski insisted on using real cats. The film premiered at Tribeca on June 26, 2024, and opened wide two days later to $261 million worldwide against a $67 million budget.
THE REVIEW
The sound concept in A Quiet Place is clever, but clever is not enough to carry a film on its own. What made the first film work was that underneath the premise there was a strong human foundation: a story about a daughter living with guilt over her brother’s death and a father running out of time to tell her he did not blame her. The silence became the pressure that forced all of that into the open. Part II stretched the universe a little thin, but still had those same people carrying that same weight. By the time Day One was announced, the franchise had already explored its concept about as far as it could go, and it felt like there was nothing new to offer. The end result sadly confirms that sentiment.
Nyong’o is the one real argument in the film’s favor, and she is a good one. She plays a woman who is already dying, and that shapes everything about how she moves through the film. Her goal for the day is not to survive the invasion but to get to a specific pizza place in Harlem before the boats leave the island. That specificity of motivation, so close to what Sarnoski did with the Cage character in Pig, gives her scenes a quality the rest of the film never quite matches. The problem is the script keeps pulling her away from it. Eric (Quinn) attaches himself to her partway through, adding a layer of emotional obligation the film never earns and that works against everything interesting about Sam’s premise. Children, other survivors, and Djimon Hounsou reprising his character from Part II keep crowding in after that, forcing interactions that undermine what could have been a focused, singular journey. The more people arrive, the less the film belongs to anyone.
The “day one” angle, which was the most compelling reason to make this film at all, is resolved in about ten minutes. Sarnoski moves through the chaos of the invasion so quickly that by the time the characters have understood the rules of the creatures, the audience has barely had time to feel the confusion of not knowing them. That is a significant mistake, since part of what made the first film work was watching the Abbott family learn those rules under pressure, over time. Here we are deposited into the same situation as the previous films but with less interesting people in it and a setting that the London backlot never fully convinces us is New York. Sarnoski cited Children of Men as a visual inspiration, and you can see the aspiration in a handful of early wide shots of Manhattan collapsing. It does not get anywhere close to that film’s sense of a world ending in real time.
Without real human stakes underneath them, the creatures generate scares but not genuine dread, and a film that relies on cheap jump-scares rather than earned tension is exactly what the first film was trying not to be. The script’s attempts to explore themes around mortality and life purpose generate more unintentional laughs than real reflection, landing with a thud every time it reaches for something deeper. Any scene that starts building tension gets interrupted before it lands: a new character walking in, a subplot demanding attention, a quiet moment reaching for meaning it has not earned.
Nyong’o does enough that the pizza scene lands anyway. She gets her slice. It is the film’s most satisfying moment, which says something about how good she is and how little the film gave her to work with.
AFTERTASTE
Sarnoski is a careful filmmaker and Pig proved he can build real feeling out of very little. This film gives him too much and asks him to use all of it, which is almost the opposite of what he is good at. Lupita Nyong’o deserved a better film built around her. Day one after watching A Quiet Place: Day One, audiences will struggle to remember much about it.