'A Quiet Place: Day One' review: Lupita Nyong'o deserves better

Enough. Clearly someone must say it. So for good measure I’ll say it twice: Enough. 

Not every successful horror conceit merits a sequel and prequel. Not every monster is unendingly scary. Not every doomed world is rich with stories. To prove this look no further than A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel so far from its origins that even its title is a stretch. 

Aside from Djimon Hounsou, who is was credited as "man on island" in A Quiet Place Part II, none of the previous cast returns. Neither does director John Krasinski or screenwriting team Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, who departed to make If and Heretic respectively. Instead, writer/director Michael Sarnoski takes the reins. Now, his last film, Pig, was a harrowing character drama studded with sharp humor and gnarly twists, which suggests he’d be a solid fit for this horror helm.

Alas, Sarnoski gets lost amid the demands of disaster carnage and franchise lore. So the tender odd couple narrative he constructs with stars Lupita Nyong'o and Stranger Things' Joseph Quinn feels uneven at best and gnawingly hollow at worst.

How does A Quiet Place: Day One connect to the earlier films?

It barely does. Far, far from the Abbott family farm of the first two films is a bustling Manhattan, where an isolated hospice patient named Sam (Nyong'o) realizes she’s not ready to die as the movie's monsters crash into skyscrapers, churches, and city streets with thundering force and outpouring rampaging. 

Determined to live long enough to get one last New York slice from her favorite Harlem haunt (seriously), she soldiers through ruins, flooded subways, and the trembling feelings of a lost law student named Eric (Quinn) all while ducking the sound-chasing beasts. In this dogged journey uptown pursued by extraterrestrial predators, A Quiet Place: Day One has more in common with 2008's Cloverfield than it does the franchise for which it's named. 

A Quiet Place: Day One swerves from monster horror to cutesy NYC love story

This collision is clunky at best. Sarnoski introduces a hardened heroine, mired in rage and self pity, who finds a new lease on life in protecting a wide-eyed baby lawyer from the big bad city overrun by literal man-eaters. Their dynamic is reminiscent of gender-swapped film-noir, with Nyong'o as the world-weary anti-hero roped into rescuing a dude-in-distress, who is so fragile he is constantly on the verge of hysterics. Yet at times, this sequel veers into the plucky sweetness of a Pixar short. 

Because of the "stay quiet, stay alive" conceit, Sam and Eric rarely speak. And so playful pantomime evolves between them that is at times charming. Their relationship feels at best slapped together. As characters they are haphazardly constructed through scraps of personal details like far-flung parents and bits of actual poetry. But that's because this is not a movie sold on its sentimental human drama, but on the promised scare cycle of quietly creeping, accidentally making a noise, and running for your lives as monsters barrel down after you.

In the first two films, the Abbotts weren't all keenly developed characters, but they found definition through their interplay as a family and their fine-tuned team defence protocols. We were invested in them collectively, rather than individually. Here, incredibly Sarnoski chooses to set a film in New York City, a place made up of a myriad of communities, neighborhoods, and found families, and manages to center his story on two loners with no ties of note. Any interest in establishing characters who feel true to the city is non-existent, and the film's disinterest in New York as anything other than a different backdrop for the franchise is obvious.

The heroes' journey uptown plays fast and loose with geography, which was also true of Cloverfield, where subway tunnels seemed to act like warp whistles. And most unnerving of all is the garish use of imagery that recalls 9/11. Downtown Manhattan thick with white dust from collapsed buildings; smoke and debris turning the familiar streets into a nightmarish haze flecked with fleeing people. Sure. Such imagery makes Day One scary, but not because of Sarnoski's skill at setting a scene. It's because he used a crass cheat code to real-life horror. 

Lupita Nyong'o is more than this movie deserves and yet she can’t save it

Almost immediately after the monsters overrun Manhattan, everyone in the city just knows you can’t talk. So most of the film is a bunch of characters who don’t happen to know sign language, struggling to communicate through gestures, pleading eyes, and occasionally writing something down.

It’s a shame to see the communication on these films get so sloppy as soon his Krasinski and his co-writers have left it behind. Admittedly, the miming is at times suitably menacing. Hounsou excels at communicating through his hard gaze and harder grip around a desperate-to-scream mouth. But it's Nyong'o who carries this film on her strong shoulders. While Quinn's eyes quiver with tears, his lips agape in horror, Sarnoski leans hard on Nyong'o's sublime profile and dark, soulful eyes to communicate fear and hope, giving depth where his screenplay does not. Still, it's not enough to keep the emotional life of this film afloat. Perhaps that explains the cat. 

Through their whole horror-studded journey, Sam and Eric carry her cat, a black-and-white wanderer named Frodo (yes, Sam and Frodo). The cat meanders through this world of monsters with an unearned confidence. At times, he seems at risk — though the monsters seem to ignore New York's resident rats and squirrels — but mostly Frodo is cut to for reaction shots. I'm not a cat person. But the audience I saw this prequel with did audibly coo over this fearless feline's every close-up.

All this to say, parts of A Quiet Place: Day One are enchanting. Hounsou and Alex Wolff, who plays a gentle, man-bunned hospice nurse, are gripping in painfully brief appearances. Nyong'o and Quinn are performers with a captivating screen presence that pulls us in steadily — when they're given something to play beyond run and hide. The action sequences here lack the impact of the first film. Perhaps because at this point there's nothing new to learn about these creatures really. Or maybe it's that Sarnoski didn't learn the lesson of Jaws and gives us too many chances to look up close until these creatures are too familiar to be feel alarmingly alien. 

In the end, A Quiet Place: Day One doesn't equal the sum of its parts. The love story at its core can't shine amid the required carnage and urban devastation demanded by the prequel's promise. The performances — while earnest — can't find footing in the crude plotting. The scares, which once were grounded in character and uncertainty, lose their luster without either. With all this movie tries to wedge in, it's just not enough. 

A Quiet Place: Day One opens in theaters only June 27.