A Quiet Place: Day One
A prime trope of horror films is that the people in them exist only to die. Not in the existentialist sense that everyone is (although what a horror film that would make) but with a much more immediate requirement to produce the endorphin rush of survivors reflex as seeming innocents reach the peak of life’s inherent unfairness. The teenagers who keep stumbling on Leatherface’s remote Texas ranch house aren’t individuals to be mourned or pitied. They’re cogs within increasingly complex Rube Goldberg machines designed to end only one way. As the enticement of horror over the years moved towards the ingenuity of “the kills” rather than the reality of “the deaths” its participants were inversely reduced. Most became mild archetypes conveying brief, of-the-moment slang and maybe a singular trait so they could be identified and catalogued when their time came. Some may be classified as ‘bad’ so their comeuppance could be correctly enjoyed. Others may be more deftly designed to increase the pathos when a real character connection was untimely severed, but the goal is always manipulation over definition.
One of the highlights of the first Quiet Place was the way the suspense and characters were designed to highlight one another rather than as a tool for easy affect. The central conceit of blind monsters attracted by sound who have decimated civilization takes a lot of work to believe in, but A Quiet Place made the pill go down smoother by focusing as much on the people it was happening to as the happening itself. It was still a suspense movie first and foremost, but it was a suspense movie that built on empathy in place of the nihilism of wanting to see horrible things befall people.
Rather than continue the story of the Abbott family, possibly in recognition of how difficult that would be without having to do more world-building than its concept can support, Day One flashes back — just as the title says — to the arrival of the monsters themselves. Director Sarnoski, who delved into the hidden depravities of New York’s food culture in Pig, lobs asteroids at the city in a wail of post-9/11 disaster trauma. Citizens are engulfed in smoke and debris, dust coating their faces in a strange camouflage as the series’ audiophiliac monsters grab victims from the shadows and lift them off into the air, leaving a handful of lone survivors to puzzle out if the world is ending or not. Dying cancer patient Sam (N’yongo), recognizing that it is for her with or without ravenous monsters, and a New York suddenly devoid of traffic is the perfect opportunity to revisit her favorite pizza place in Harlem before the end.
More travelogue than monster movie, internal as much as external, Sarnoski ignores the macro view of what the creatures are doing and how the status quo of the first film came about to focus as minutely as possible on the singular. A singular which comes and goes, like the creatures themselves, in flicks of sensory overload: the fear of the attack, the beffudlement of occasional government pronouncements from the sky and ensuing sounds of stampede, the pain of a recurring disease as pain medication suddenly becomes as impossible to acquire as the rarest earth metal, concern and despair for a service cat trapped like its master in circumstances it cannot comprehend and only react to.
The monsters themselves, devoid of higher intelligence and acting only on instinct in a great slavering rush at any sound which attracts their attention, are nature’s dark side: a complete amorality to the lives and feelings it will destroy in the name of everyday survival. (How the government is not able to use this involuntary swarming to herd creatures too hard coded to keep from accidentally drowning themselves into an area where they could be disposed of is a question for another day). On the opposite end is Sam’s faithful service cat, Frodo, viewing one destructive scene after another with a calm equanimity that offers comfort and hope even in the face of absolute loss. Like God looking after weary pilgrims, his appearance brings islands of safety and recollection while his sudden disappearance presages disaster.
One such pilgrim, Joseph Quinn’s Eric, is a young law student far from home, cut off from even the dying comforts of family and familiarity when monsters begin climbing the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the army bombs the city’s bridges to keep them from escaping. Found by Frodo after he escapes a water clogged subway tunnel he is brought to Sam to get both of them moving towards their necessary destinations – a return from their disaster caused disassociation with humanity and a return towards life. For Sam that means an acceptance of her disease and of all the parts of her past she has pushed away including memories of her pianist father, her writing as a poet and a general willingness to be around any living being besides Frodo.
In the process Sarnoski takes the time to dive back into the wilds of New York as an empty shell of itself, its various office buildings, theaters, libraries and churches recontextualized without people filling them up anymore. It’s an attraction of the post-apocalyptic genre no director can avoid since the Morlocks and Eloi danced through the ruins of old humanity in The Time Machine. Wes Ball’s Apes just attempted similar, for similar reasons, with a Los Angeles reclaimed by nature. Sarnoski also takes the naturists eye on human cities, divorced from Nicholas Cage’s self-exiled hermit in Pig into a detached God’s eye view to roam unfettered and mostly judgment free over the pockmarked and burned buildings which are more often the sign of the creature’s presence than the creatures themselves.
Recognizing the difficulties the creature’s mere presence brings to maintaining belief in their own movie, Sarnoski leaves them in the background as much as possible; a constant, screeching source of menace more often than actual threat. It heightens the moments they do arrive, honing in on the drumbeat of human feet as a crowd tries to reach rescue boats on the Hudson Bay or the sudden accidental crunch of a glass shard underfoot, and pushes the increasing absurdity of their existence into the background when they retreat. For Sam and Eric it doesn’t matter how this is happening, only that it is. “Day One’s” refusal to look away from them is its greatest strength, transforming them from thin avatars into vessels of real empathy. When they find themselves within sight of escaping boats on the river and a horde of creatures between them, the reward is no longer the expectation of their demise but the much more potent hope and fear of their survival.
It’s a bold choice to transform a monster film into a character study (a light one, but one nonetheless), a choice “Godzilla Minus One” showed the benefits of and Day One applies with surety. It may have been the only direction the film and the series could have gone without falling into the collapsing gravity of its own backstory. That risk is still out there – Day One may end up being a franchise high the series never reaches again – but for now it remains a singular success.
7.5/10
Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou. Directed by Michael Sarnoski.