'A Quiet Place' Needs to Shut the $%@! Up
'A Quiet Place' Needs to Shut the $%@! Up
Even Lupita Nyong'o can't save this garbage franchise.
If ever asked to define the term “sophomore slump,” one could do no better than to point to writer/director Michael Sarnoski’s A Quiet Place: Day One. Sarnoski’s first film, Pig, was an eccentric, introspective, moving story about grief; A Quiet Place: Day One is deeply stupid bargain bin emotional pornography.
I could write a book detailing all the ways this film fails, so get the one thing it got right out of the way: casting Lupita Nyong'o in the lead. Nyong'o is an incredible talent too often relegated to shit movies that are completely beneath her, as is the case here1. She’s perfect in every single frame of the movie, but even her luminous presence cannot keep this trash heap afloat.
A prequel to John Krasinki’s pair of flicks about carnivorous blind monster that hunt using sound, A Quiet Place: Day One begins in the same place as most great horror movies: a New Jersey hospice. There, we meet Samira (Nyong’o), a poet2 dying from an unspecified form of cancer who is, understandably, quite surly towards everyone around her save for her cat, Frodo. Her something or other (she calls him a nurse but he’s seen leading a group therapy session), played by Alex Wolff, lures her on group trip to New York City to see a children’s marionette show - just what all dying adults long for! - with the promise that she can get a decent slice of pizza while they’re there.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned sound-sensitive monsters invade that very same day. Wolff reunites with Sarnoski here after playing an important role in Pig; he’s a prominent actor (his other credits include Hereditary and Oppenheimer), but he’s barely in the trailers, plus he tricked a poor dying lady into seeing a puppet show and is thus due for a comeuppance. So I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say he’s not long for this world. Oh well. At least he doesn’t have to sit through the rest of this dreck3.
The aliens can’t swim, so the military start evacuating people on boats leaving from South Street Seaport. But since she’s gonna die any day now regardless, Samira decides that she and her cat are heading in the opposite direction, to Harlem, to eat what will likely be the last-ever slice from her favorite pizza joint, where he dead father used to take her as a kid (that’s why the cat’s name is Frodo - ‘cause she’s on a long, perilous walk).
Along the way, Samira meets Eric (Joseph Quinn), a law student first seen emerging from a subway station that has been completely flooded. What was he doing down there? How did he get out alive? Shhhh. Don’t worry your pretty head little with such questions. Sarnoski certainly didn’t!
Eric seems to be in a state of shock, but he tells Samira that he’s scared and doesn’t want to die. So he does what anyone would do in that situation and decides to follow this suicidal stranger uptown, away from rescue.
Will Samira be able to get to the pizza place before she drops dead? Will Eric suddenly go, “Wait a minute, what the fuck am I doing here?!?!” and turn around to start walking the right way? Will Sarnoski dare to potentially upset the audience by killing Frodo? If those seem like interesting questions to you, perhaps you’ll enjoy this picture.
Anyone in search of even a hint of intellectual, emotional, or aesthetic engagement, on the other hand, is shit outta luck. There’s no real thematic connection between what’s going on with Samira and what’s going on with the monsters; as far as I can tell, she’s dying from cancer, carrying a cute (and preposterously well-behaved) animal, and crying about her dead dad because those are all effective means by which to get the audience to care about her even though she has no actual character. We have even less connection to Eric, who, I repeat, acts like a complete moron the entire time.
I think the movie probably could have gotten away with being either cloying or idiotic - it’s the combination of both that proves fatal. The aliens’ level of sensitivity to sound varies from scene to scene, based on Sarnoski need: one moment, an action as small as something gently hitting the ground can be enough to bring a seemingly every creature in the city running, but another moment, banging a piece of metal from three feet away is barely enough to make them suspicious. Had I not so desperately wanted the characters to be eaten, the disparity probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much.
Thing is, all of these elements - the inconsistent rules, the use of a disability as a substitute for depth, the characters who continuously behave in nonsensical ways - are hallmarks of the Quiet Place franchise. Krasinki, who is a good actor and a lousy filmmaker, didn’t write or direct this one, but he gets a “story by” credit and was one of the movie’s producers. So I’d like to think this is all his fault, and that left to his own devices, Sarnoski might have made a much better movie. It’s also possible that Sarnoski’s secret sauce on Pig was co-writer Vanessa Block, who has nothing to do with A Quiet Place: Day One. This movie is poised to make a lot of money, which presumably means Sarnoski will have a lot of creative control over his next outing; we’ll know soon enough whether or not Pig was a complete anomaly.
Djimon Honsou, reprising his role from A Quiet Place Part II, is also completely wasted here, as he is in most big Hollywood movies.
We get to hear some of her poetry late in the movie. It’s not good.
Neither does American goddamn treasure Denis O’Hare, who is in the trailers but not the final film.