‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ review: back-to-basics prequel feels smaller but still scream-worthy

On the surface, this prequel to surprise 2018 sci-fi smash A Quiet Place (and its sensational sequel A Quiet Place Part II) looks like a throwback to the good old days of the ‘80s blockbuster. Move the action to New York, boost the budget and super-size the alien threat, and everyone can have a yacht by Christmas. But we live in more straitened times, of course, and the result is – for better and worse – a smaller and more intimate prospect than its billing perhaps suggested.

The first two movies, helmed by John Krasinski, explored a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by sightless aliens with advanced hearing: one sound might cost you your life. Little-seen in the first movie, the enormous, fast-moving creatures resemble a scaly combination of xenomorphs and that minging spider thing from Silent Hill; not someone you’d want to bump into down a darkened alley, as they say. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance of that happening in A Quiet Place: Day One, given that the action takes us back to their crash-landing in Manhattan.

We’re in full Quiet Place reboot territory here. After much to-ing and fro-ing behind the scenes, relative newcomer Michael Sarnoski is now in the director’s chair, with the previous films’ Abbott family also eschewed in favour of Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a cancer-stricken woman with a compelling, finely drawn backstory. Along the way she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), a British lawyer so reserved he keeps his tie on even as his suit becomes ever-more ruined in the carnage. Before long he looks like mid-’00s Pete Doherty at the end of a massive bender.

Also in the mix is Sam’s cat Frodo (ably portrayed by two felines called Schnitzel and Nico), who’s supposed to emotionally moor the film but seems more of a liability than anything. Nyong’o is magnificent – one moment of bug-eyed horror speaks volumes in a movie whose dialogue is naturally limited – while Quinn works hard to locate his poorly shaded character. Eric just sort of shows up and we’re supposed to care about him.

Luckily, that boosted budget ($67m versus A Quiet Place’s $17m) is evident in wide-scale shots of the monsters crawling up wrecked skyscrapers and skittering through abandoned offices. It is genuinely shocking to see New York in this devastated state and the action sequences will likely cause your breath to catch in your throat. By the end of Part II, the Abbotts had effectively found a way to overcome the aliens; Sam and Eric have no such luxury. This helps to counterbalance Sarnoski’s screenplay, which is subdued and sometimes too ponderous for its own good, though a few more thrills and spills still wouldn’t have gone amiss.

So it’s no Aliens or even Gremlins 2, which the film resembles in its relocation to the Big Apple, but nor is it Alien 3, a confused affair that betrayed a similarly laboured journey to the screen. Instead, Sarnoski has crafted a tonally cohesive but low-key drama that happens to be interspersed with moments of white-knuckle terror. Appropriately enough, A Quiet Place: Day One is more of an urgent whisper than a shout.