A Quiet Place Day One (2024)

Just like the first two Quiet Place movies, which aren't about monsters that hunt by hearing and are in fact about something far more real, Day One finds its centre by focusing on something more than silence. Effectively scary and unnerving, Day One is strong due to its quest for life. We follow a character who may have given up and decides she is going to seek out living, what it means to be alive, more than running to just stay alive. 

Krasinksi's Quiet Place movies are about how terrifying parenting is and just how little control we have as parents over the lives that are entrusted to us. Day One focuses instead of finding out own agency in choosing how we want to live, and how we want to die. Casting Nyong'o, an actor of very high caliber, was important for pulling off such a story. She has the chops to deliver a complicated yet relatable character in the centre of this horror story and imbuing it with the strength to make this something more. 

Day One may not quite reach the heights of the series, partially due to the fact that it never escapes its NYC setting, a place which has been the scene of so many horror stories, and never quite finding a way to differentiate it from other disaster movies. Perhaps it never quite finds the originality that the other films do. Day One feels a bit more standard, yet still strong, especially in how it doesn't linger on the horror moments and instead finds its strengths in the human story. Not having to create the world that the other films set up give it the freedom to be on its own and hit the ground running yet it keeps its story small and personal which mostly works for me. 

Writer/Director Sarnoski, whose first film Pig was remarkable, has delivered here even if he hasn't quite captured a zeitgeist in the way this series debuted. Overall I am happy to say there is not yet a bad A Quiet Place movie yet.  

A Quiet Place Day One

Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou

Writer/Director: Michael Sarnoski