A Quiet Place: Day One is the rare prequel that excels in spirit

Watching A Quiet Place: The First Day is a sensory reset, not to the alien horror movie you know you’re in for, but to the intimate human drama that a lesser film has given up on. Among his beautiful images, you can see the distant New York skyline at the edge of the Queens Cemetery, a sight familiar to anyone who has visited the city. Resignation is seen among terminally ill patients in palliative care. Mostly, we catch the beautiful face of Lupita Nyong’o as Sam, a young man in the prime of her life with cancer who keeps the injustice of her situation beneath the surface.

Sirens and the screech of fighter jets make their way onto the soundtrack, as they should in any sequel to 2018’s A Quiet Place and 2020’s A Quiet Place Part II. But even as white smoke and ash fill the air (those 9/11 memories are best left at home) and angry creatures burst like cows through the city’s glass and steel canyons, there’s a strange commitment to the darker edges of post-apocalyptic cinema. . It’s less “Furiosa” and more “The Road.”

Sam is already ready to die, giving the film an impressively dark tone and saving us from the intellectual machinations of the survivors’ plans. She just wants to walk very quietly – about 120 blocks north from Chinatown to Harlem, where you can devour the last slice of Patsy’s pizza before those treats become ancient history.

It’s a refreshing, almost radical concept on which to build a studio film, and as Sam sets off, bag in hand and his black-and-white support cat, Frodo, at his side, you might remember that other history of women and life. The cat stay, “Alien”, is drawn to the bone. (One also wonders wistfully how New York’s thousands of dogs fared with these pesky, noise-hating invaders.)

The man who accomplished it all is screenwriter Michael Sarnoski, who last saw Nicolas Cage’s recognizably human performance as a broken chef in The Pig, which was also about facing some kind of personal catastrophe. (He Now he has made two of the worst movies in history). Sarnoski, who co-wrote the story with original creator John Krasinski, has a James Cameron-like action sequence that was probably ordered by the powers that be: the chase. Sequences in flooded subway tunnels – yuck – and abandoned places.

But he’s at his strongest in the personal moments, like Djimon Hounsou’s career-best shot of intense, screaming guilt after accidentally killing someone by panicking too much. There’s also a British business friend (Joseph Quinn, Metallica’s latest cut in Stranger Things) who just wants to join Sam on his search for pizza. At the very least, we somehow understand that he spent a lot of time on the planet connecting with other people, and that he will only be able to make up for it one day.

You can take or leave the subplot about Sam’s writing career and his dashed dreams. More poetry for this viewer is that she stops by an abandoned bookstore, as we all would, and picks up a used paperback (appropriately, Octavia E. Butler’s 1987 science fiction novel Dawn) that you sense she read) and the smell of the pages: a story captured in a single sniff. He also enjoys the last remnants of humanity. This is a movie that knows a lot about the psychology of the future. I hope we never know such sadness outside of an ambitious summer blockbuster.