A Quiet Place Day One

This was a fun nerve jangler, not quite up to par with the first two. Placing the action over a day or two in one location - it's basically Escape from New York: Alien Edition - neatly encapsulates the fear. The early bombing of the bridges traps the water-shy invaders on the island, the aim being to evacuated citizens from the ports. Fine idea, though the devil is in the detail. We know from the other films in the series that these lumpen-footed Skeksis, with Rubik's football heads can't see but can hear incredibly well. Sound is obviously very important here. One nicely done exodus scene with a growing cacophony of humanity brings about the inevitable bloody chaos. 

The leads, Lupita Nyong'o as Samira and Joseph Quinn as Eric, are very good at selling us the horror, panic and resignation of the situation. Djimon Hounsou reprises (PREprises?) his role from the second film. And there's a nonplussed cat that will get the animal lovers meowing (it's a pretty clever angle, albeit one that asks us to stretch incredulity a bit too far).

The film has a happy knack of forcing us into playing along with the characters - can we hold our breath? Will we be able to stay absolutely, silently still? If the small crowd in my screening is anything to go by, we'd be totally fucked in 2 seconds flat. For the woman in the film screaming for her kid, substitute the gormless lad in cinema 7 ploughing into his popcorn. For the cat brushing past a bell, hear our nearby chip packet cruncher. For car alarms, tag in the girl in row F dropping phone and snorting. No hope.

There's some solid tension building, as is par for these films, but it relies on jump scares for its rhythm, and it lagged a touch towards the end, after they reached the Harlem pizza place. Just on that, is having Samira, a character we know is dying, head in the OPPOSITE direction to everyone else a good way to engender audience support for her? It felt like her ending was clear, so what were we hoping for? I'm not sure her apparent surrender helped our 'identification' or empathy for her, maybe much in the same way as Eric's panic attacks might drive us away from identifying with him. Or perhaps this is a more likely reality than films usually want us to believe. There's no precedent for our behaviour in alien attacks. Yet.

A Quiet Place Day One is screening in many noisy cinemas right now.

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The director of this, Michael Sarnoski, also recently did the great Nic Cage film, Pig (2021). Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow (2014) had similar aliens, as far as I remember. And, sure, this isn't a film but someone should adapt the Max Barry book Providence (2020). It's a pearler.