Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn must escape a Manhattan overrun by aliens in A Quiet Place: Day One.
Invading aliens transform a bustling New York City into a silent wasteland in the latest trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel to the first two films in the hugely successful horror franchise.
(Mild spoilers for A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II below.)
As reported previously, the original film began in medias res over a month after an alien invasion set in early 2020. Sightless extraterrestrial creatures wiped out most of the humans and animals on Earth. They hunt by sound thanks to their hypersensitive hearing and are difficult to kill because they sport tough armored skin. The film centered on the Abbott family, struggling to survive a few months after the initial invasion. Dad Lee (John Krasinski) was an engineer focused on keeping his family alive each day. Wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) was a doctor, pregnant with their fourth child.
Krasinski originally intended A Quiet Place to be a one-off standalone film, but it was a critical and box office hit, ultimately grossing $340 million globally against its modest $17 million budget. So naturally, there was a sequel featuring the surviving family members as they processed their loss and encountered other survivors.
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, Day One is designed to be a standalone spinoff set in the same universe but following a different cast of characters, although Djimon Hounsou reprises his Part II role as the Man on the Island, whose name turns out to be Henri. There isn’t a longer official synopsis, just a single logline: “Experience the day the world went quiet.” Lupita Nyong’o stars as Sam, while Joseph Quinn—who stole our hearts as Eddie Munson in Stranger Things S4—plays Eric, a clean-shaven young businessman. The cast also includes Alex Wolff and Denis O’Hare in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
The first trailer dropped in February and opened by briefly reminding us of what came before: the Abbott family on Day 471, before tragedy struck, followed by the survivors on Day 477, including a brief glimpse of Cillian Murphy’s Emmett from Part II. Then the clock wound back to Day 1 as Sam walked down the streets of Manhattan holding her cat. Naturally, all hell broke loose as the creatures crashed to Earth and promptly began devouring any readily available humans.
This latest trailer builds on that earlier footage to give us a better idea of the premise: It’s basically Escape from New York with invading ravenous aliens gobbling up any noisy human in sight. We see Sam buying a candy bar in a Manhattan bodega and claiming her cat is a service animal when the clerk objects to its presence. Then the aliens arrive, and she quickly teams up with Eric to find a way out of the city, which is on lockdown. That’s not going to be easy since the US military blows up all the bridges leading out of Manhattan, having ostensibly chosen to sacrifice everyone on the island in hopes of containing the invading species. We know how well that strategy worked out.
I like the way this trailer shifts constantly between the usual urban noise and utter silence, driving home just how much the world is about to change. Survivors quickly realize the importance of staying silent and exploit that aspect, like when Eric tosses a brick through a deserted car’s window to distract the creatures so he and Sam can make a break for it. And we get a couple of decent jump scares when a sudden loud noise brings the alien hordes. (RIP nameless old man who turns off a loud generator a few seconds too late.)
Verdict: The film looks worth seeing, but prequels are always tricky. At least Day One isn’t trying to recapture elements that made the first film so uniquely compelling—e.g., starting in the middle of the story and letting the audience discover the secret of this silent world, as well as rarely actually showing the creatures. The big question is, will they save the poor cat?
A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters on June 28, 2024.
Listing image by Paramount Pictures