2024's A Quiet Place: Day One is lean and mean, a prequel to the original to the sequel. It's a blueprint vehicle mind you, made to be an obligatory prelude to something else, something maybe more elaborate and pulsing in the repugnant alien department. The runtime is short, there's danger readily around the corner, and with "Day One" I was getting some serious post-COVID vibes. "Shh". Oh you know it brother.
Directed by the unseasoned yet polished Michael Sarnoski and starring Lupita Nyong'o of 12 Years a Slave fame, A Quiet Place: Day One is about just what it says it is. I mean it's day one of the invasion in NYC where if you make a peep, those pesky, spider-like critters will get cha. Speaking of said critters, well they really snap to it, stampeding, howling, and climbing up city walls with total aplomb. "Day One's" CGI, yeah it's obviously evident yet very well done, as the images of bloodthirsty Death Angels look cloaked into the screen, keeping it real.
A Quiet Place: Day One, well it's hardly original, borrowing its depopulated look from World War Z and its morbidly nasty concept from The Descent (another flick about creepy crawlers who rely on faint sound to hunt humans). Oh well. Helmer Sarnoski gives "Day One" that compact, efficacious treatment anyway, doing the best he can to make you feel all "end of the world"-ish as you jump from your seat on his paltry budget of $67 mil.
Yup, there's about three scenes in "Day One" that have ample buildup and provide barbarous, monster payoffs (pun intended). I mean the actors featured (Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff) don't exactly give Laurence Olivier-like performances but whatever, it's nearly a silent film after all, with three-dimensional conceptualizations of post-apocalyptic dread that are literally on the come up. Pride of "place".
Written by Jesse Burleson
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