The average noise level on a New York day is 90 decibels, set to drop to zero at the start of A Quiet Place – Day 1. We already know what to expect from the beginning of this Apocalypsebecause we have already experienced its transformation into normality with the first chapter and the glimmer of a possible positive resolution for humanity with the second dedicated title.
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski after Jeff Nichols (The Bikeriders) left the director’s chair due to creative differences, A Quiet Place – Day 1 shows us the beginning of the invasion in one of the cities most devoted to alien invasion in cinema: New York. It is perhaps the only concession to the genre’s tradition of a film that surprises (in a positive way) for how it seeks its own path, ending up being an accurate mirror of our time, historical and cinematographic.
Samira and Eric are a truly contemporary pair of protagonists
The protagonists of the film are Samira and Eric, couple epitome of contemporary cinematographic sensibility. In fact, they are a couple on a purely formal level: two strangers, who find themselves together by chance, in the midst of the silence and destruction that suddenly changes the New York scenario. She, played with the usual tense intensity by the excellent Lupita Nyong’o, is a terminal patient living in a hospice and battling a cancer she cannot defeat. She is in town for a puppet show, a surprise visit because, in her condition, every experience is a farewell to that experience itself, every day is a possible last time. She dreams of going for a pizza, one last pizza.
Eric instead suddenly emerges from a flooded subway, his eyes full of terror, half drowned and half dead from panic. Joseph Quinn it is the perfect representation of that male protagonist devoted to sensitivity and kindness who has been missing from the media for a very long time. He is not weak, but he is not afraid to show his fear, his sensitivity. He is a young university student who left his parents in Kent to go and study law in the Big Apple. With the fall of the metropolis, his future changes radically. His life choice not only did not lead him to the future he hoped for, but today it throws him into the impossibility of seeing his loved ones again before the end. He is profoundly, desperately alone.
In the middle there is Frodo, Samira’s cat, who, like all felines, is studiously oblivious to the desperation that surrounds him. He wanders around the city, on a leash and escaping from the woman’s arms, oblivious to the aliens. It is he who brings Samira and Eric together, forcing them to chase him and save him, acting as a comfort to them when the quiet awareness of the end of everything creeps under their skin.
The restrained horror of giving in and letting go
A Quiet Place – Day 1 aims precisely at this feeling. There is no shortage of tense scenes that we expect, the thrill every time a noise raises the decibel threshold and the protagonists stop, waiting to find out whether they have been heard by one of the alien creatures or not. The apocalyptic and horror component, however, is quite nuanced, a backdrop from which one tries to bring out something else. After all, Samira was already living her personal Apocalypse before the entire world was overwhelmed by the global one.
A Quiet Place – Day 1 aims precisely at this feeling. There is no shortage of tense scenes that we expect, the thrill every time a noise raises the decibel threshold and the protagonists stop, waiting to find out whether they have been heard by one of the alien creatures or not. The apocalyptic and horror component is quite subtle, however, a backdrop from which one tries to bring out something else. After all, Samira was already living her personal Apocalypse before the entire world was overwhelmed by the global one.
Eric instead follows the woman and her irrational choice not to evacuate but to go in search of a slice of pizza in the Bronx, driven by an irrationality that is equally easy to read. Samira’s human company is preferable to an anonymous and solitary attempt to prolong one’s life a little longer. A Quiet Place – Day 1 therefore surprisingly proves to be a more touching and sad film than a horror full of fear and tension. What is missing is precisely the kinetic energy of the protagonists who oppose the end of their future, of hope.
Their attitude would have been inconceivable in genre cinema 10, 20 years ago. Yet it captures the current moment very well, even more than the cinematic (and real) family of A Quiet Place. Eric and Samira condense the generational solitudes of Millennials and Gen Z. It does so with a script that is almost irritating in how much it clings, albeit with great effectiveness and much inventiveness, to the anxieties and desires of these spectators.
Frodo, the cat that acts as a narrative thread and emotional support for the film, in this sense it is particularly emblematic. Praise to Michael Sarnoski for having chosen to embark on the far from simple adventure of shooting such a complex film with a real animal on set, and one with an unpredictable nature like the feline one, when the studios were pressing to recreate Frodo in CGI . Frodo’s presence though acts as an emotional dam, as it does, for example, of the yellow cardigan worn by the protagonist. It is no coincidence that animal and garment become a sort of relay in the final stages of the film.
A Quiet Place – Day 1 hints at an almost taboo scenario for horror, apocalypses and disaster movies: the one in which the protagonists let themselves go, that there is no hope of a future perspective, of a way out. He does so in an environment that is deliberately constructed so as not to be destabilizing: Samira follows a suicidal impulse, but after all her time was limited from the beginning. Eric corrects his trajectory as he goes along.
It’s like the movie wanted to present us with a very dark scenario, putting on the table a traumatic experience with no way out, told with participation, feeling, without nihilism or cynicism. Nevertheless continuously contains the possibilities, the evolutions, the drifts of this premise, preferring to give us emotionally touching moments such as the night in Samira’s apartment, the stop in the church, as well as obviously the finale in the Bronx.
If we want to apply all the cynicism that the film itself keeps well away from, it almost seems as if the film constructs this scenario by already putting a cardigan on our shoulders and a cat in our arms, finding a perfect excuse to console us, reassure us, hug us even before we have stuck our hand all the way into the horror.
