A Quiet Place: Day One is an Abomination
Paramount Pictures, 100 minutes
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so bad it’s actually good. Maybe the story isn’t quite dialed in totally or the characters are a bit silly, but at the end of the day, it’s just a bit of fun. A Quiet Place: Day One is not that movie. It is a film that is simply bad. I would argue it’s not enjoyable in any way, shape, or form.
It’s not as though I was expecting an award-winning type of film either. I didn’t go into A Quiet Place: Day One thinking it was going to be the next Silence of the Lambs. Judging by the mostly positive critical and audience reception for the film though, I thought it’d be at least decent. It’s not.
It’s hard to point out the worst aspects of the third entry into the Quiet Place universe since every part of what went into this movie is pretty poor. I guess we can start with the story (or lack thereof). Basically, you remember those aliens from the first two movies – this time we focus on a woman and her cat in New York City right after those aliens arrived. There’s a bit of running around and, well, there isn’t much more to it than that.
The gimmick, as is the case in the other films, is that the aliens have super hearing and if they hear you, they will snatch you away immediately and kill you. Except sometimes they don’t. The aliens propensity for killing seems to vary based on a character’s importance to the story. If a random person makes a single noise, they are almost instantaneously killed. When our heroine smashes multiple car windows and causes a commotion, the aliens just run around a lot, but somehow do not catch her.
There’s also this idea in the movie several times where if it’s raining out, you can basically start speaking normally and the aliens won’t hear you. I don’t know how this idea came about since you can still hear people talking even if there is also the sound of rain or water running.
Anyways, our heroine is a terminally ill cancer patient who was visiting the city to see a marionette play at the time of the invasion. It’s a horrifically bad setup for a character since it provides us with exactly zero stakes for her. She’ll be dead soon anyways – she just wants that one good last slice of pizza in NYC!
That pizza part isn’t a joke. A major plot point for the movie is that our protagonist wants a slice of Patsy’s Pizza in Harlem. She doesn’t really care about escaping Manhattan (since she’s going to die soon anyway). I don’t know who thought this idea was a good one besides writer-director Michael Sarnoski and maybe the owners of Patsy’s Pizza.
The fact that we’re in New York City isn’t really important to the story. This could really be any major city. Except for the fact that Patsy’s Pizza is located in Harlem, I suppose.
The terminally ill patient travels around with a support cat on a leash. At first, I thought this was going to be a small part of our story towards only the start of the movie. It’s like the screenwriter was saying, “Look, isn’t it quirky and cute – she has a support cat?!” But then the cat is featured prominently throughout the entire movie. He doesn’t do an awful job. In fact, the cat probably delivers my favorite performance. Still, I’m not so sure we should’ve gotten so much of him in the film. Or maybe any of him.
The aliens themselves are your typical Stranger Things-type monsters we’ve become accustomed to. They’re not scary or creative. If your idea of great horror is periodic jump scares, then you’re in for a treat. Otherwise, there’s zero to like in the actually being scary department.
I don’t have much more to say about A Quiet Place: Day One. It’s a dumpster fire of a film that I consider to perfectly embody everything wrong with Hollywood today. It’s a cash grab prequel with zero creativity that brings no interesting ideas or characters to the table. Then, it combines said bad story and bland characters with subpar effects. I didn’t even get into how boring A Quiet Place: Day One is, but rest assured, it is slow.
If you’re in the mood for a fun horror movie, definitely do not watch A Quiet Place: Day One. If you want to watch a bad movie that’s not at all fun and be bored, then by all means, give this stinky turd a try.
Grade: 2/10