A Quiet Place Day One: Refreshingly Simple...Maybe Too Simple

When I first watched the trailer for "A Quiet Place: Day One" the day it debuted online, I can't exactly say I was thrilled with what I saw. Part of what made the first two A Quiet Place movies so special was their intensely personal stories, and judging from what I saw in the trailers, Day One looked like it was going to lean very, very heavily on spectacle and scares over characterization. In essence, it looked like the director of the film, Michal Sarnoski, had stripped everything that made the world of A Quiet Place special from the film in favor of making an apocalypse movie in the vein of 28 Days Later. But I digress, because conjecture is a poor judge, and when the movie came out in theaters, I was excited to go see it. If nothing else, it was going to be a return to a cinematic world that was rather unique when compared to other movies it was competing with. And now that I've seen it? Well, I can say with great relief that my initial reactions to the trailer were objectively incorrect. A Quiet Place: Day One is an intensely personal film that is very much in the vein of the other two movies, even if its scale is significantly larger, so that wasn't a problem. However, there were other problems that the film had, and I'm going to discuss those in detail in this review, but before I get there, the obligatory spoiler-free synopsis!

A Quiet Place: Day One follows Sam, a terminally ill woman from New York, and her cat, Frodo. Sam only wants one thing before she dies: to eat pizza in Patsy's pizzeria, a jazz bar located in Harlem as well as a place where her father used to play music. Navigating her way through this strange apocalyptic event in the heart of New York City, she befriends a man named Henri, a law student from England. Together, the two of them strike out toward Harlem to get what Sam calls the best pizza in New York.

OK, so if my brief synopsis makes the premise of the film sound a little goofy, I promise that you are not the only one who thought that. I was on the fence about the premise when I first heard it, but by the time the credits rolled, I was down bad for this bizarre scenario. I really appreciate this film's departure from complicated plots, and its willingness to tell a simple, personal story in a world where any other franchise would have taken the spectacle route. By making Sam's goal a simple one, this movie never really gets into lame subplots that tend to dilute other blockbusters of a similar scale, and it really makes us root for Sam. I ended up wanting Sam to get the pizza almost as badly as Sam wanted to. Her terminal illness makes her a woman with nothing else to lose, and almost a crazy woman at that. And on paper, this goal of trying to get pizza almost makes the movie sound like a relatively irreverent subplot from Mad Max or The Walking Dead. However, I can assure you that Sam's goal is treated with nothing but the utmost respect, dignity, and sincerity, which was a pleasant surprise in an industry that too often makes light of a character's goals and desires. And in a weird way, it kind of made sense while I was watching the movie. An insane world breeds insane and simple goals, and it was really refreshing finally getting to see a film that is willing to tackle seemingly elementary ideas, ideas like what would you want if you could only have one more thing, and why? A Quiet Place is a franchise that prizes personal stories, and I have to commend Day One for its intentionality to make a truly large-scale story with the smallest of scopes.

Now, one complaint that I do have with the film is its plotting, which I'm going to discuss in length later, but I do want to bring up the fact that the movie has some of what I can only call occasional strokes of absolute emotional genius. Day One is at its absolute finest when it leans fully on the raw humanity it tries so hard to build itself on. There's one scene that I'm not going to dive into too deeply for the sake of spoilers, but you'll know it when you see it, and that's because it's a culmination of the film's larger ideas, finding importance and significance in the small things. There are other moments like this one, namely a scene where Sam and Henri scream with joy and terror and sorrow and gladness at the sky whenever thunder resounds after not having been able to talk for so long, but the scene I'm tiptoeing around is easily the biggest emotional payoff of the entire film, so I'm not going to delve too deeply into the details.

Now, this movie is far from perfect, and is probably overall the weakest entry in the franchise so far, so I'm going to spend a little bit of time discussing the areas where Day One falls short. As much as I love its daring simplicity, Day One is a little bit too simple and doesn't have enough content to warrant even a 99-minute runtime. Very often, this film feels like a first draft of a much better movie, like the writers came up with a handful of awesome and touching scenes, and then didn't know how to string them together, so they just kind of let the film meander around for a little while to waste time in-between sequences that actually push the story forward in a meaningful way. And this next complaint is more of a nitpick, but you can tell that a lot of this film was shot on soundstages instead of on-site, which I suppose makes sense, given that New York City is, as of now, a thriving metropolis that is not currently going through an apocalypse of any kind. However, it definitely did detract from the overall experience of the movie. Day One lacks the "bigness" that the world of this story needs, even though it has impressive VFX work and clearly is trying to paint itself as a catastrophic event of Biblical proportions. Out of every issue I listed above, the biggest one is definitely the pacing of the film, which was extremely stop-and-start and lacked the drive that a film like this vitally needs. However, what keeps the movie grounded is Sam and Henri's goal to get pizza, and that's really all that matters in this film: Sam and Henri and what they want.

All in all, Day One is an above-average apocalypse movie that is time well spent in a theater. A lot of audience members seemed to complain because the movie doesn't explain the origins of the monsters, but you can't really expect it to. It's a perspective-driven film that is set at ground zero of this disastrous invasion, and I think that if you throw any expectations you might have about the movie out the window, you're really going to enjoy yourself. After all, if we only got what we expected from a movie, then what's the point of writing or going to watch a movie in the first place? Besides, if you think answers about an apocalyptic event are going to come from a citizen of New York City with terminal cancer, I don't know what to tell you. In the last few months, I've come to despise the term "missed opportunity" when it gets used in reviews, and that is incredibly convicting for someone who uses it a lot. That term has become slang for "I didn't get exactly what I wanted," and is a stand-in for legitimate complaints about a movie, some of which I have mentioned above because there has been some legitimate criticism leveled at this film. Now, Day One is definitely the weakest entry in the franchise so far, but that's not saying a ton because this movie is still solid all the way from beginning to end. It's a good and refreshingly simple movie with occasional moments of greatness, but maybe it's a little too simple for its own good. But hey, I'll take it over whatever impersonal, bombastic, cut-and-paste product the MCU is putting out right now. Unless it's Deadpool and Wolverine. That actually looks kind of good, and I may be submitting a review for it once I see it. But for now, that's my thoughts on Day One. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a film I give a tentative thumbs-up to. It's no masterpiece, but it's competently made and is willing to wear its heart on its sleeve. And sometimes that's enough.

A Quiet Place: Day One - 7/10

Revelation 8:10-11