The reason why A Quiet Place (2018) works is that it does not treat its high concept as a gimmick. The high concept is that the alien Death Angels have super-hearing and will indiscriminately kill anything that makes a sound. They are fast, agile, and ruthless adversaries and if they hear you, you are already dead. So, what is confounding about A Quiet Place: Day One, the third entry in the franchise, is that it boils this feature down to a simple gimmick. The same idea is true: if you make noise, you’re dead, but this concept is no longer central to the storytelling.
The interesting things that A Quiet Place: Day One does are quite separate from the ideas that serve its foundations for horror. Yes, we experience New York being ravaged because it’s loud and that’s what attracts the Death Angels, but survival is now made into set pieces and causes for jump-scares, rather than being baked into everything about the characters and their way of life. This is unavoidable in one way, as this is a prequel, and the characters have no understanding of what is happening around them; everyone is still dying, but they’re not really sure why, although they immediately sense it’s because the monsters have good hearing, and instinctively know what to do about that.
This time around, the actual crux of the movie’s storytelling is a bit more dependent upon the emotional arcs of its characters. That’s not a bad place to be when the movie stars Lupita Nyong’o as lead character Samira, because she will always hard-sell emotion, and she does so here, with all of her talent on show. Her character also has a cat called Frodo! The cat is played by two cat actors, respectively, Schnitzel and Nico, who also hard-sell emotion, as the root of the movie becomes a “save the cat” premise. Notably, the film is directed by Michael Sarnoski who made the very-good Nicolas Cage pig-revenge movie called Pig (2021), and now seems to have set in motion a calling card for working with animal actors. Also opposite Nyong’o is Joseph Quinn as Eric, who joins her on the journey, because the cat trusts him, too.
Motivations for the characters are now based on more internal factors, as this is emergence day, and they don’t have a lot of context for their storytelling to revolve around this new threat. So the film idles as a horror movie, mostly, except when it insists upon itself with jump scares and by creating gimmick set pieces using the high concept about the aliens and their fine-tuned hearing. But motivations in this movie have little to do with this: Samira wants to have a slice of her favorite pizza before civilization collapses and needs to source some medication — a normal trope of zombie films reinserted into this alien movie — but none of Sam’s motivations, about her health, about her poetry, about her pizza, about her father’s history with a jazz club, about her cat, are intrinsically tied to the high concept premise. Instead, the new movie tries to widen the story by being about other things, but in doing so, separates the prime text of the action apart from the horror. The horror is now something that happens on the way to these other things being done.
The context and geography of space is also harder to track, as A Quiet Place: Day One is now a journey film, rather than a settlement defense film. This, much like in the second movie, sets events on a different track than in the first one, because the whole context for telling the story has shifted from bunkering down to running away, and that means different things in horror. Because New York is massive, densely populated, and we move through constantly-shifting settings, we do not have a material sense for how the Death Angels are properly occupying this space. We now only believe the gimmick: they are respondent to sound, but are not necessarily a threat always, because the city is loud, and you can be quiet. Another way the movie anchors itself to a different context, straying from the outline of Alien, the inversion of “no one can hear you scream” to “but your worst nightmare can,” becomes, this force of nature is just gonna ravage this city, but it’s noisy, and the aliens have a lot of killing to go do, and are not just hunting the Final Girl and her cat, like in Alien, and so they become something more like a survivable and indirect threat. We cannot connect the sense of terror to any individual Death Angels, and so there is no followable consistency in that terror, there are swarms of enemies, and not one distinguishable threat where we can build and understand their patterns and behaviors in this environment.
All this, and A Quiet Place: Day One still does not feel self-complete, ending on a fade-away, as only half the story is resolved. We can figure out essentially what must happen, if they do not make a Day Two, but they seem to be angling to do that. While the high concept fades away in this widening universe, some of the horror does too, but you’re still here for Lupita Nyong’o and her Final Cat companion, and for so many viewers, that is likely all they’ll need. We just realize the greater opportunity of doing that, plus staying true to the franchise’s storytelling center. A Quiet Place: Day One takes the story in new directions, but those directions mostly move away from horror as a plot device and toward more general survival movie antics, and don’t we have enough movies like that set in New York? Now we have one more.