12. A Quiet Place: Day One, dir. Michael Sarnoski
First of all, this movie has the best movie pet of 2024. Frodo the Cat, played by Nico and Schnitzel, is the best. There is no way any cat is well-behaved enough to survive A Quiet Place invasion, the cats would probably join the aliens instead of doing what Frodo does: be a mysterious fairy creature to guide the protagonists together. I know a cat that meows for hours at 3 AM for no reason other than to be an asshole.
There was a strange amount of misunderstanding as to what this movie wanted to achieve. The wiki writers in the audience came away very disappointed; there were not many alien lore pages to update after seeing A Quiet Place: Day One. The movie skips over of the initial alien attack in Manhattan. Day One in fact takes place largely during Days Two through Four. If you do want to see the startling chaos of the first few minutes of aliens landing to ruin a normal day, they did that already in A Quiet Place Part II. (And you do get a really alien attack in Day One eventually.) The aliens make for a great tension-building construct, but they are the most boring part of the Quiet Place movies. Even their design is that generic Cloverfield shape we've seen a thousand times now. They are just spooky monsters that eat people using frankly nonsensical sound rules to force video game-y stealth sequences. I like these movies for those thrills, but I the aliens do not matter. People seemed really disappointed when A Quiet Place: Day One was focused on its human characters and emotions, as if that was not always the point, even back when this was John Krasinski's vehicle. Michael Sarnoski, coming off Pig, has even greater ambitions for this franchise.
A Quiet Place: Day One kept most of its premise secret during the marketing campaign. People expected just aliens in New York, and got something more. The trailers did nothing for me. Day One was one of those movies whose release I was anticipating just so I would not need to see the coming attraction again for the twentieth time. I largely saw this because Lupita Nyong'o is a great actress and sadly has not had much acting to do in the last five years. She was exactly the kind of presence needed for a movie like this. Nyong'o can carry scenes entirely alone with just CG monsters and Frodo, so she is great for a monster movie. But this is also a meaty dramatic role. Our heroine, Sam, is a very rare kind of character for a monster movie: she's dying of cancer at the start.
Palliative care is not a topic many films will grapple with. It is not something that society in general much wants to think about. Death is an inevitable part of life - and unlike some writers, I'm not going to pretend that it is good, death sucks - it is something you'll need to deal with one day for yourself and your loved ones. I've had to have difficult discussions with family members about end of life planning, and you do not want to know the details. The medical system is built to keep you alive against all odds, using miracles of science and industry to pull it off. However, there is also a moment where the battle is not worth it, where some levels of existence are clearly worse than the alternative. Sam is in that process now, the youngest person by decades in a ward full of the walking dead. She's angry at the world, and not going to get happier with it now that its in flames.
"Why should I care about the last days of a near-dead woman anyway?" It is exactly Sam's instinct to stay alive that makes A Quiet Place: Day One interesting. It is not a question of whether she will die, rather how she dies, whether it be just random bad luck in an alien's jaws or something more meaningful. This is the process of letting go. Day One is the best movie of this franchise by far, asking much more of its audience than the nostalgic white pastoral fantasies of the Krasinski movies. Sam starts in downtown Manhattan and wants to walk all the way up to Harlem for a particular pizza spot she loves. This is not really an odyssey to get past the space monsters, rather it is one through her own memories and past. We're not saving the world or an idealized vision of farm life, we're saving a woman's soul through, of all things, performance.
A Quiet Place: Day One had me crying at three separate moments, including one that was not even melodrama. This movie opens with Sam and her hospice traveling into Chinatown to see a puppet show, which sounds like a particularly trite way to spend one of your few remaining days on Earth. Then Sam is stunned, as are we, by a surprisingly beautiful puppet of a little boy, moving with remarkable realism. What does this scene have to do with aliens? Nothing. It is just a moment of simple truth that meant something, that made her feel something other than embitterment. We cut straight past it to 9/11-esque imagery of New York City covered in soot and chaos. Random fate hands her a partner in Eric (Joseph Quinn), a fellow survivor of which she shares nothing in common. He's just a lost guy, who washes up from a flooded Subway station and has nowhere else to go. And his most touching act to save her is also a silent pantomime of a magic show. The movie transcends mere monster fun by having these almost inexplicable moments where the care and love you put into production actually means something. Art finding its connection.
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