Samira (Lupita Nyong’o) is about to die. Not for the reason the rest of the world is, the aliens hypersensitive to sound that just crashlanded on earth, but because she’s terminally ill. So when the apocalpyse arrives in the middle of New York City, she doesn’t break out into the same kind of panic that inevitably kills many others. There isn’t that desperation to survive that’s so common in these types of movies—A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place: Part Two (2020) have already dealt with that plenty—instead, it opens up a different kind of story. Of someone who almost gets to watch the apocalypse from the outside and just wants to get that one final slice of pizza before it’s all over for her.
Michael Sarnoski made his feature debut with Pig (2021) and immediately became one of the new directors to watch. It’s an incredibly beautiful and quiet movie that meditates on loss and grief through the journey of an ex-cook who wants nothing except his beloved truffle pig back. It’s a movie that, in part, works so well because of how it plays with the revenge-driven John Wick-esque action movie that saw a huge growth in popularity in the years before its release, creating an eerily similar set-up and situations throughout the movie only to pull out the rug from under the audience with its refusal to get violent.
So with A Quiet Place: Day One Michael Sarnoski isn’t just riffing on a kind of action-packed movie that has been gaining popularity, but this time directly working within one. And once again, he uses the established framework to tell a beautiful story about grief, using familiar set-ups and taking them in new directions.
I was most impressed with the first third, which asks a very simple question. When you can’t cry, can’t scream, or can’t talk to another person, how can you possibly process the end of the world and all the emotions that come with it? The premise of A Quiet Place: Day One over its previous entries allows Sarnoski to really hone in on the immediate trauma people experience as the Death Angels literally come crashing into the middle of every day city life. Maybe the most haunting image from the entire franchise occurs here: a woman desperately holding her mouth shut and slowly walking away after loved ones just died, doing everything she can to not breakdown crying right then and there, because if she does, she too will be dead.
Around the same time, Samira also comes into contact with Eric (Joseph Quinn), a young man who’s desperate to team up with someone so he’s no longer alone in all of this mayhem. The two eventually get to have a conversation with each other when a rainstorm complete with regular, loud thunder rolls over the city, which creates an important moment of exhalation for both the characters and the audience. For the first time, breaking the tension that has accumulated, that unlike the previous entries in the franchise, isn’t built on suspense but on the lack of emotional vulnerability any character has allowed themselves until this point.
Once they have said their pieces and teamed up, the two of them, accompanied by one of the cutest little kitties you’ll ever see in a movie like this, go on a journey that forces them to swim against the current, an image that at one point is made quite literal. While everyone else is trying to leave the city, reaching an organized meeting point from which people will be brought to safety with boats, Samira and Eric are making their way into the city to allow Samira to get that final piece of pizza before succumbing to her illness, in the process being able to take in the city that she grew up in one last time in silence, without the masses that plague it nowadays; the opening scroll is rather explicit about the noise pollution a city like New York produces before stripping it all away with the arrival of the aliens.
And so Michael Sarnoski once again goes against the grain of the genre expectations that might be placed on a movie such as this. He once again creates a quiet and deliberate film about the process of one’s grief. And he once again proves that he is a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on.
