When A QUIET PLACE tiptoed into our cinemas back in 2018, audiences were completely blown away, not just by the suspense-filled story of a family trying to cope with living in a post-apocalyptic world filled with hypersensitive-hearing aliens but also how it was presented with barely a sound to be heard once the family realised that they needed to be quieter than a church mouse if they wanted to survive. I remember sitting in the cinema and there wasn’t even the sound of popcorn munching to be heard. Writer-director John Krasinski, who most people knew as Jim Halpert in the American version of THE OFFICE, surprised many people with his expert direction and especially his highly effective use of sound. The film did exceedingly well at the box office, pulling in US$341 million off a paltry $17 million production budget. With numbers like that, it wasn’t surprising that a sequel would be next and A QUIET PLACE: PART II arrived in cinemas in 2021, although it had premiered over a year earlier in New York. While the film didn’t do quite as well at the box office as its predecessor (US$297 million), probably because of the pandemic which limited most people’s desire to sit in a room with a few hundred strangers for a couple of hours, it did well enough that the producers felt that another kick at the can (shh!) would be in order, this time revolving around the characters Evelyn and her family meet on the remote island.

In A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE, the clock has turned back to, well, Day One – the day the aliens arrived on Earth and changed life as we know it. Sam (Lupita Nyong’o, the BLACK PANTHER films; US) is a cancer patient living in a hospice on Long Island. On that fateful day, she joins her nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff, OLD; PIG), on an outing to the city, bringing along her service cat, Frodo (played by Schnitzel and Nico). When all hell breaks loose, Sam and Frodo quietly try to make their way to Harlem, dodging both aliens and other survivors, where Sam intends to eat a slice of her favourite pizza for what may be the last time. Along the way, she meets British law student Eric (Joseph Quinn, OVERLORD; TV’s STRANGER THINGS) and, after a rocky start, the two find the strength to work together to give the other what they want most.

This all sounds well and good but wait… what? I thought this film was supposed to be about the colony of people who survived on the island. Yes, Djimon Hounsou (GRAN TOURISMO) is in this film, and we now know that his character’s name is Henri, but he’s only in three, very short scenes. This story does indicate that there will be a group of survivors living someplace that will be surrounded by water as the aliens definitely can’t swim but that’s as far as that storyline goes. A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is really just about Sam and Eric, and how Frodo is not just the world’s quietest cat but apparently is also the only cat ever that isn’t hydrophobic.

Full marks to Nyong’o for her performance because it’s passionate and grounded. Sam is a fighter and even though her cancer is winning, she doesn’t give it any more power than it already has. She takes that same approach when dealing with the aliens. If she’s going to die, it’s going to be on her terms. Writer-director Michael Sarnoski (PIG) ably picks up the baton from Krasinski, making sound the centerpiece of the film and delivering plenty of jump scares as the aliens swoop in and snatch bodies in the blink of an eye. This time around, we see not just more of how the aliens look but also more of them and how they move. One thing that struck me strange this time around was that we learn that the aliens have invaded the whole planet at that same time and they’re efficient killers. I guess that’s two things. Presumably, they eat the people (and animals, birds and insects too, if you remember the other films), bones and all, as we never see any remnants of dead people lying around and that begs a huge question: If they’re able to decimate life on Earth in just one day, what will they eat on Day Two? There are only so many rats and cockroaches to go around, although the aliens would probably just leave them alone because they’re both so quiet. Yet, we know from the other films that at least a year goes by and the aliens are still able to find something to eat.

Highly unrealistic portrayals of a cat and gaping plot holes aside, and there’s a big one in the set design at a jazz club that Sam and Eric go to in Harlem, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is still an entertaining film. I can’t help but feel, though, that audiences have seen this twice before. This spin-off prequel doesn’t bring anything new to the table. We don’t learn anything about the aliens that we didn’t already know. They can’t swim and they can’t discern multilayered sounds, which is something that Sam figures out very early on. It’s just more of the same with new people.

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE opens in Hong Kong today (June 27^th) and around the world tomorrow. It’s well made but rather pointless. In this summer of audience discontent at the box office, I can’t see it doing very well at all.

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