Movies | Horror
A Quiet Place: Day One — A Good Movie, but Not a Good Prequel
A Quiet Place has quickly grown to be one of the most successful horror IPs in recent memory, and for good reason. The idea of monsters that can kill you upon making a single sound is so uniquely terrifying that its concept, characters and, well, sound design has propelled the franchise to massive popularity.
This article will contain spoilers for Day One and the A Quiet Place franchise as a whole, so I recommend clicking off if you haven’t seen the movies.
The main threat of the A Quiet Place universe are the Death Angels, an alien species that will viciously attack anything that makes sound due to their incredibly sensitive ear canals. Each one is about 6–9 ft, over 400lbs and has tough skin that makes them invulnerable to most attacks. The only thing that can kill them is to shoot them in their fleshy mouths at point-blank range or by playing a very specific radio frequency. They can also be indirectly killed by water as they cannot swim.
Whereas the original two Quiet Place films take place in the countryside and follow an average nuclear family around 75–500 days into the invasion of the Death Angels, Day One takes us back to the first day of the invasion and places us in the heart of New York City, possibly one of the most dangerous places to be for creatures that hate sound.
Meanwhile, our protagonists in Day One are completely unrelated strangers who happen to find themselves in the same horrible situation.
Sam is a poet with a severe cancer diagnosis. She is miserable in her life in her hospice awaiting her fast-approaching death. She owns a cat named Frodo, also an integral character.
Eric, on the other hand, is an Englishman who has moved to New York to study at a law school. He is completely out of his element and has no family, friends or connections in the United States.
By pure chance, when the Death Angels invade, both Sam and Eric meet each other, and Sam wants to make the most of the situation and revisit the jazz club where her father used to take her and get pizza before she inevitably dies, from either the Death Angels or her terminal cancer diagnosis.
Eric, in a dire need for companionship and nowhere else to go, decides to travel with Sam to try and make her last couple days happy ones.
Day One is a great film, I won’t deny that — Eric and Sam are wonderful characters who bounce off each other incredibly well. Eric’s kind, warm, yet clumsy and fish-out-of-water energy merges beautifully with Sam’s cynical, depressive yet smart and mature nature.
Their interactions are meaningful and poignant, perfectly capturing the panic of a crisis, but also show that people truly can be kind in the face of adversity. I had so much fun watching Eric do card tricks, pondered life with Sam in the rain, and my heart ached as they screamed their lungs out to relieve the pressure of the impending apocalypse during a thunderstorm.
This dynamic of strangers who become friends under pressure makes Sam’s final sacrifice at the end of the film that much more worth it. Her cancer diagnosis has given her nothing to lose, and now that her last memories due to Eric’s kindness are happy ones, she has the strength for one final Hail Mary — a mad dash through the highway making as much noise as she can to draw attention away from Eric so he can board a ship to safety.
The irony that the beginning of the apocalypse contained Sam’s happiest memories in a long time, all thanks to a random stranger who had no reason to help her, makes her sacrifice for him the perfect way to cap off the film and tugs at all your heartstrings.
Whereas I think some aspects of the other films are slightly stronger, Day One — without a doubt — has my favorite cast of characters in the series. Both are extremely likeable, work well together and are uniquely special in their own ways.
I’d also like to mention my gripe of the characters in the original two films falling into the “horror movie characters being stupid” trope, such as the mother of the family getting pregnant during the apocalypse and the boy in the second film alerting the Death Angels to his location by exploring a house noisily for absolutely no reason.
This is fixed here. Eric and Sam, at least to my knowledge, make rational, level-headed decisions, some even smart ones like triggering a car alarm to get the Death Angels away from them. This is so refreshing to see when so many horror movie characters have me wanting to yell at the screen to stop making cliched horrible decisions.
New York as a setting also works wonders for the idea of the film. The city is so much more dangerous than the countryside and the swarms of Death Angels in this film compared to the one or two in the other ones is infinitely more terrifying. The city traps its protagonists in an urban cage that makes them so much more vulnerable. There is a constant sense of fear, mystery, and stomach-turning unease in all the films, but the cityscape enhances it to all new heights here.
So that’s my praise for the film. As a side story and movie as a whole, it is very good. It’s short, sweet, and scary.
However, this movie was marketed as a prequel to the previous movies, and that raises a few eyebrows.
When I think of a prequel, I think of a movie that fleshes out aspects of prior films and establishes a reason for why things are the way they are in further entries.
Day One does none of this. We don’t learn anything about the Death Angels that we didn’t already know. We don’t learn why they invaded, and there’s no explanation or information on government responses to the apocalyptic threat.
Day One does absolutely no new worldbuilding. It just rehashes info we already knew for new viewers, which is not a great look for a prequel, which are normally meant to expand the world of a particular story.
Also, if you have seen the first two movies, the idea of the Death Angels and having to stay completely silent with no new ideas introduced can get a little stale in non-action or character driven moments.
But all in all, Day One is a great side story film for those itching for more A Quiet Place content. Even for those unfamiliar with the franchise, it’s still worth a watch because of its scares and characters alone.
