A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

"Sam" (Lupita Nyong'o) is living at a residential home when a group of them take a day out to the big city. She only agrees to go if she can have pizza, but that opportunity is soon kiboshed when their minder "Reuben" (Alex Wolff) tries to herd them back home after a city-wide alert is called. Things are falling from the sky - and these things are hungry. With carnage ensuing, she and her cat manage to find refuge in the theatre they were attending but with even the slightest of sounds attracting their foes, she realises that heading to Harlem for a Pepperoni from Patsy's might be her best option. Walking silently, she encounters the dazed "Eric" (Joseph Quinn) who has come from the UK to study law in the USA and has ended up with much more than he bargained for. Initially reluctant, she agrees to walk with him and gradually a bond develops as the environment gradually and dangerously disintegrates before them. Luckily, the monsters can't swim - so perhaps they can try to make it to the water? Obviously there's not a great deal of dialogue here, so the accumulating sense of (limited) menace is built by two actors who are adequate but who don't really have enough to work with to make this stand out. As ever, the lengths people will go to to save their pets astonishes me. Danger everywhere and yet both feel the need to risk life and limb for a moggy! Bizarre. It's difficult at the best of times to get much traction from prequels, and Michael Sarnoski doesn't really manage to develop the characters or the story beyond this ninety minutes of stand alone cinema that really has little to do with the other, far better, films from earlier in this strand. It's watchable enough, but nothing remarkable. Pity.