Lupita Nyongo’s Breathtaking Talent Rings Loud in ‘A Quiet Play: Day One’

Technically, A Quiet Place: Day One, which hits theaters June 28, is a prequel to John Krasinski’s 2018 hit A Quiet Place and its 2020 sequel A Quiet Place Part II. Yet in reality, it’s a separate tale set in the same universe as—and, chronologically speaking, before—its predecessors, which helps it avoid some of the pitfalls normally associated with such backstory-centric affairs. A saga about an unlikely pair’s attempts to survive the sudden arrival of a race of aliens with supersonic hearing, Pig writer/director Michael Sarnoski’s film isn’t as nerve-wracking or as poignant as its franchise ancestors. Still, courtesy of an intense lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, it packs a moderate silent-but-deadly punch.

At a New York hospice, Sam (Nyong’o) reads a poem about the shittiness of her life among the facility’s elderly patients. This mildly rankles nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff), albeit not enough to dissuade him from inviting her on an outing to Manhattan to see a show. Wearing a red knit cap and a look of wry misery, Sam reluctantly agrees to this excursion once Reuben gives in and says that they can also get NYC pizza. Boarding a school bus, Sam gazes out the window at the Big Apple as her beloved black-and-white service-animal cat sits on her lap. When they arrive, it turns out that they’re attending a marionette performance, and though Sam rolls her eyes at this surprise, she’s soon entranced by the elderly artist’s boyish puppet, whose movements—and ability to blow up a balloon that temporarily renders him airborne—prove more than a bit magical.

Sam is emotionally fragile and she has a bandage covering a wound on her side, yet the reason she’s in hospice care is never fully explicated by A Quiet Place: Day One. An air of mystery consequently hovers over the ensuing pandemonium, which explodes once Sam is told that they must skip pizza due to a burgeoning metro crisis, and things swiftly go to hell thanks to fireballs in the sky that bring with them screechy, long-limbed, auditorily enhanced extraterrestrials. Chaos erupts in grand explosions that cover everything in dust, and while Sarnoski doesn’t deliberately create 9/11 parallels, it’s difficult not to think about that fateful day as Sam tries to make her way through a blinding haze of ash and dirt, unsure of her circumstances or whereabouts, and surrounded by screams and roars.

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