NOW STREAMING ON:
A dying cancer patient is confronted with her own mortality through the lens of an apocalyptic alien invasion. A quiet place: day onean unexpectedly moving and often terrifying horror film currently showing in Prague cinemas. This distanced prequel to John Krasinski’s two main series Quiet place Aside from the nature of the alien threat, this film has little in common with its predecessors, which makes it all the better for it.
A quiet place: day oneas the title suggests, is set on the first day of the alien invasion, when hospice patient Samara (Lupita Nyong’o, whose heartfelt work here deserves an award), dying of cancer and given only weeks or months to live, travels with her cat Frodo to a puppet show in downtown Manhattan. Samara has long since lost all hope and can hardly bear the thought of such entertainment, but compassionate nurse Rueben (Alex Wolff) convinces her to make the trip with the promise of visiting her favorite pizzeria on the way back.
But who would have thought, during the show a race of alien monsters accidentally invades Earth, leaving Samara and other survivors trapped in a decaying theater while the world becomes hell. The basics are quickly established: these aliens are blind but have hypersensitive hearing and pounce on any source of noise to find their human victims.
But no man-eating threat will stop Samara from getting a piece before she dies, be it from cancer or a monster, and the narrative of A quiet place: day one quickly takes shape. While other characters (including the briefly played Djimon Hounsou, the only one carried over from the earlier films) quietly flee to the docks on the advice of military helicopters to escape Manhattan, Samara makes her way to Harlem.
Along the way, Samara and Frodo gain a traveling companion in the form of British college student Eric (Joseph Quinn), who is lost in many ways and sets out on a journey to find a last piece of human security while the world collapses around them.
Because A quiet place: day one is set at the very beginning of the invasion, avoiding some of the nagging questions of the earlier films, where the characters were adjusting to their new, quiet world months or years later. Questions like why the characters don’t live in areas of constant noise that the monsters avoid, or why no one has tried sonic weapons on them before, are irrelevant here.
Instead, our leads just want to survive immediately threat without much thought for tomorrow, which nicely parallels Samara’s journey through the end of her life. And while the aliens pose a threat in the here and now, they also force Samara to confront her own mortality in a way that feels real and earned, no small feat for a franchise horror film.
A quiet place: day one also features many well-crafted horror suspense scenes, including a claustrophobic journey through the sewers of Manhattan and a standout scene in which Eric and Frodo travel via girders through an alien cave on a mission to obtain fentanyl for Samara (this may be one of the few films in which the opioid is portrayed in a positive light).
Kudos to director Michael Sarnoski, who previously directed the similarly emotional Nicolas Cage film Pigbecause he not only created a successful horror film, but also gave it a meaning that is not normally found in films of this type. A quiet place: day one is not the scariest film of the year, an honor that perhaps The first omen or Long-leggedbut it might be what stays with you the longest.
Special mention must go to the feline actors behind Frodo (credited as Schnitzel and Nico), who deliver one of the most memorable animal performances in recent history.
