Monsters from beyond the stars that destroy anything that makes a sound above a whisper have decimated New York City, rendering it silent within a matter of hours. And before the dust has even settled, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), faced with the prospect of horrifyingly certain death, has probably the most quintessentially New York reaction ever captured in cinematic history: She’s determined to make it to Harlem for a slice of pizza.

That moment is played for a quick laugh, but writer-director Michael Sarnoski, fresh off the similarly and unexpectedly moving Pig, lets it linger. Sam is serious about the pizza, and we’re invited to find her quest preposterous, but over the next hour or so, the full weight of why the pizza is so important to Sam comes into view, and by then, A Quiet Place: Day One has morphed into a bittersweet tale of what it’s like to genuinely and fully live with a death sentence.

And, no, that’s not as much about the sound-sensitive space monsters as you might think. While Sarnoski is able to mine some harrowing terror out of their arrival, the aliens are the least interesting part of Day One. Sam is dying before they get here. The film opens at the hospice care facility where she’s staying, disgusted by the varying faces of death around her and annoyed by the nurse (Alex Wolff) who constantly prods her to be social. But most of all, she’s disgusted with her tired, embittered self for the way she holds her pain at bay with a steady dose of fentanyl patches while also knowing the end can come quite literally at any minute.

So, while Sam’s survival instincts kick in when the aliens start landing and tearing New York and its population to shreds, there’s an eerie calm that settles over her and the film as a whole in the aftermath, when the streets are silent and sound means death. Nyong’o has a hell of a tightrope to walk here. There’s such futile weariness to Sam as she engages in every aspect of the act of continuing to live, and it threatens to make her a miserable protagonist to follow in the apocalypse. And yet, she also embodies a certain humanist mindset—that of people who, despite being hopelessly down and out, still share their food with a starving neighbour, give directions to the lost, and find deep wells of gallows humour in the worst possible situations.

At first, it feels like that humor is what puts Sam back on the streets of New York the day after the aliens arrive, looking for pizza with little more than a bag of food and books, her service cat Frodo in tow. What seems like a fool’s errand eventually takes shape as her last purposeful act, one that comes into even sharper contrast when Eric (Joseph Quinn) crosses Sam’s path.

In any other movie, Eric would fall so quickly into cliché, as the frightened, quivering British coward who makes the mistake that gets people killed. But Quinn etches Eric as a poignant, empathetic soul, a man who finds himself in the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and clings to Sam as the last frail thread between him and insanity.

The new world doesn’t give the two of them much reason for optimism. Day One is dutifully bound to its horror franchise trappings, and the begrudging requirement to show us something we haven’t seen from the invaders, but at least Sarnoski proves himself a patient, steady hand with the fearsome aspects, bringing more of the subtlety that he brought to Pig into this film in unexpected ways. His vision of a ruined New York quickly moves past the initially 9/11-flavoured terror of the invasion and leans into otherworldly images of an utterly dead and unrecognisable city that quite often recall the uneasy, sorrowful beauty of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

But in the end, it’s in the moments between the alien attacks, when it homes in on the very real, diseased spectre of death, that Day One finds its true power. Lonelier, sadder, and ultimately more powerful than A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, Sarnoski is fascinatingly fixated on people figuring out what life even means, given the chances of it ending at the drop of a dime. Like most of this series’ best action, the big bombastic noise is often a distraction from something far more intimate and, in Day One’s case, something far more existentially beautiful.

8/10

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.