Review: 'A Quiet Place: Day One' takes viewers to the beginning of an alien invasion, with Lupita Nyong'o putting a thoughtful twist on the survival narrative

The sci-fi/horror franchise “A Quiet Place,” started brilliantly by director/actor John Krasinski in 2018 and continued by him two years later, proves itself to be durable enough to survive the dreaded prequel treatment in the effective and sometimes touching “A Quiet Place: Day One.”

The entire movie happens in the same time frame as the flashback prologue of “A Quiet Place Part II” — the day the aliens the hyper-sensitive hearing landed, and started tearing humans limb from limb. Here, though, we aren’t reintroduced to the Abbott family from the first two films, but are given a whole new location and characters.

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski (“Pig”) starts by introducing us to Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a bitterly sarcastic writer living in a cancer hospice outside of New York City. She’s surly to her nurse, Ruben (Alex Wolff), even after she’s put her pain-management patch on. She’s almost grateful when Ruben arranges a day trip for the hospice residents into the city — with a promise to Sam that they’ll get real New York pizza while they’re there. 

Sam — who takes her well-behaved cat, Frodo, everywhere she goes — almost doesn’t notice what her fellow hospice residents see and hear when they’re in the city: Air-raid sirens, and many contrails in the sky, all heading to Earth. There’s little time to wonder what’s approaching, because soon there are explosions and flying debris everywhere. Amid the dust and confusion, it becomes clear that the horrific, spindly aliens attack anything that makes a loud noise. To survive, Sam quickly learns, she must be silent.

(Point of personal privilege: I’m bummed that a question I had from the first movie remains unanswered — how the hell did a major newspaper print an edition with the headline warning “It’s Sound!”, when there wasn’t enough reaction time to put out a newspaper, and the presses would have probably made enough noise to attract the beasties before they’d get a copy printed. OK, digression over. Back to the review.)

Sarnoski devises some powerful action pieces that carry Sam through the narrative. There’s the father (Dijon Hounsou) protecting a group of survivors in an old theater, at a terrible cost to his conscience. Later, and for more than half the movie, Sam encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn, from “Stranger Things”), a young Englishman who becomes the traveling companion Sam doesn’t want but desperately needs.

Nyong’o, an Oscar winner for “12 Years a Slave,” may seem a bit overequipped for an action movie like this (and, yes, I’m remembering her appearance in two “Black Panther” movies and as a voice in the “Star Wars” sequels). But then, as Sarnoski’s story and hidden motive comes clearer, the audience understands the game. Sarnoski and Nyong’o are exploring an intriguing idea for a movie like this: How do you play a survival scenario when your character, who’s already in hospice for cancer, knows they’re not going to survive?

It’s an emotional high-wire act, and it’s not surprising that there are a few times when it feels as if the movie will lose its balance. (The cat gets just a little too much screen time, for one thing.) But Nyong’o holds everything steady, giving us an action heroine guided solely by the desire to experience a moment of normal life before it all comes crashing down.

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‘A Quiet Place: Day One”

★★★

Opens Friday, June 28, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for terror and violent content/bloody images. Running time: 100 minutes.