'A Quiet Place: Day One' Review: Moody's Prequel Surpasses the Original

To watch “A Quiet Place: Day One” is to recalibrate your senses, not to the alien horror movie you know awaits you, but to the intimate human drama it clings to, long after a lesser film would have given up. Among his beautiful images is the distant New York skyline seen beyond a Queens cemetery, a sight familiar to anyone who has ever driven into the city. There are the resigned looks of terminally ill patients in a hospice. Mostly, we stare at the exquisite face of Lupita Nyong'o as Sam, a young woman in the prime of life stricken with cancer, who carries the injustice of her situation just below the surface.

Sirens and fighter jet screeches make their way into the sound mix, as they must in any prequel to 2018's “A Quiet Place” and 2020's “A Quiet Place Part II,” more of the same. But even as smoke and white ash fill the air (those 9/11 memories are best left at home) and angry creatures rampage like cattle through the city's glass and steel canyons, there's an unusual commitment to the deepest margins. dark scenes of post-apocalyptic cinema. It's less “Furiosa” and more “The Road.”

Sam is already prepared to die, which gives the film an impressively sombre tone and spares us the routine machinations of a group of brave survivors. All she wants to do is walk… very quietly – about 120 blocks north from Chinatown to Harlem, where you can eat the last slices of Patsy's pizza before such delights become ancient history.

It's a refreshing, almost radical concept on which to build a studio film, and when Sam sets off, with a tote bag on his arm and his black-and-white support cat, Frodo, at his side, it's possible that you remember that other woman and -Feline survival story, “Alien”, stripped to the bones. (One also wonders, sadly, how New York's thousands of dogs fared with these irritable, sound-averse invaders.)

Responsible for all this is director and screenwriter Michael Sarnoski, last seen delivering a recognizably human performance from Nicolas Cage as a shrunken, broken chef in “Pig,” which was also about facing a personal catastrophe of sorts. (He's now made two of the most downbeat food movies in a row.) Sarnoski, who wrote the story with original creator John Krasinski, manages quite well with the James Cameron-style action sequences that were probably imposed by the powers that be: chase sequences in flooded subway tunnels (yuck!) and abandoned monuments.

But it's strongest in the personal moments, like the best shot of Djimon Hounsou's career, consumed by a spiral of guilt and holding back a scream after accidentally killing someone by panicking too hard. There's also a business-suited Brit (Joseph Quinn, last seen destroying Metallica in “Stranger Things”) who just wants to join Sam on his quest for pizza. With minimal words, we somehow understand that he has spent too much time on the planet not connecting with other human beings, and he may only have this day to make up for it.

A subplot about Sam's writing career and her frustrated dreams can be accepted or rejected. For this viewer, there is more poetry in the fact that she stops at an abandoned bookstore, as we would all do, picks up a used paperback (fittingly, Octavia E. Butler's 1987 science fiction novel, “Dawn,” that one senses one has read) and smell the pages: a story captured in an aroma. She is also savoring the last vestiges of humanity. This is a movie that seems to know a lot about future psychology. I hope we never know such sadness outside of an ambitious summer blockbuster.