A Quiet Place: Day One: A Family Needs a Pet to Work

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MOVIE INFO:

Experience the day the world went quiet.

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REVIEW:

Every family needs a pet to make it seem complete.  In A Quiet Place Day One, a movie where silence is both golden and a survival necessity, that animal can only be a cat, the only nonhuman creature that won’t scream or move a muscle in the face of horror.  The other two members are a dying black mother poet, Samira (Lupita Nyong’o)and a white businessman with a sense of decency and morality, Eric (Joseph Quinn). Frodo the cat is played by two felines named Nico and Schnitzel.

Samira and Eric can only scream with their facial features.  Frodo, Samira’s support cat, stays bemusedly placid, quiet and unfazed and always hit his marks. He’s the direct genetic echo of Jones the cat from the original Alien bumped up to starring supporting role, a movie that heavily influenced A Quiet Place creature design, and also featured monstrous aliens who kill because there would be no horror movie if they didn’t. Frodo is the children replacement from the first two films.

A Quiet Place: Day One works rather well as a silent film. It even features a couple of Charlie Chaplin homages.  The director Michael Sarnoski takes full advantage of Nyong’o expressive acting style for a bit of poetic eloquence amongst the horror.  Nyong’o can craft layers from the smallest body and facial movements. Quinn also moves as if he has had some mime background hidden in his British theater school resume.

There are many reasonably scary creature attacks, but they are just a required subplot.  They exist to unify and unite cat, white man and black woman into a sexless family.  Any idea of intercourse is about as hard to find as seeing corpses in the rubble of New York streets.  The movie is about strengthening the human family in its biggest moment of adversity.  That idea is platonic and sanitary, completely lacking or needing to display memento mori.  It just wants to show the strengthening quiet that bookend the storms.

The only thing that bothered me was the need to reverse the kind of white favoritism found in some socially conscious horror movies.  Eric is the only white man on the last boat out of the city (possibly the one white man left),  a boat that is overflowing with black folks, who eagerly pull him aboard and pat him on the back.  The spot was made possible by Samira’s poignant sacrifice. It might have been better to have both of them saved and Samira granted a more eloquent ending with a proper memorial.  Schmaltz for sure, but far superior to allowing the idea that white rule can be reestablished on an equal and beneficial basis.     

A Quiet Place; Day One gets a 3.5/5 or a B+.

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CREDITS:

Directed by

Michael Sarnoski

Screenplay by

Michael Sarnoski

Story by

• John Krasinski
• Michael Sarnoski

Based on

Characters

by Bryan Woods

Scott Beck

Produced by

• Michael Bay
• Andrew Form
• Brad Fuller
• John Krasinski

Starring

• Lupita Nyong’o
• Joseph Quinn
• Alex Wolff
• Djimon Hounsou

Cinematography

Pat Scola

Edited by

• Gregory Plotkin
• Andrew Mondshein[1]

Music by

Alexis Grapsas

Production

companies

• Platinum Dunes
• Sunday Night Productions

Distributed by

Paramount Pictures

Release dates

• June 26, 2024(Tribeca)
• June 28, 2024(United States)

Running time

99 minutes[2]

Country

United States

Language

English

Budget

$67 million

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