Lupita Nyong’o in the horror film Taut Horror Prequel

Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong’o in “A Quiet Place: Day One.”

If you want to breathe new life into a horror film that centers silence as the only way to survive an alien invasion, there are countless worse ideas than moving the story from small-town USA to densely populated New York City. Open screen text over an aerial shot of Manhattan accompanied by the sounds of car horns, sirens and screams informs us that the Big Apple has an average noise level of 90 decibels, the equivalent of a human scream. The setting alone makes for a consistently tense and terrifying atmosphere A Quiet Place: Day One An intense experience that brilliantly extends into an enduring franchise.

Lupita Nyong’o excels at drawing us inside her character’s fear in Jordan Peele’s chilling film we, so her groundbreaking performance here as a woman trying to survive while actually living on borrowed time is no surprise. The biggest question was whether Michael Sarnosky could follow up on his confirmed debut film, pigwith something equally special.

The short answer is an emphatic yes. The sophomore writer-director adapts to the demands of the genre, expertly maintaining tension, raising big scares throughout, and earning our emotional investment in the main characters. Plus a cat. But he also finds the space to bring many of the qualities that elevated his 2021 Nicolas Cage vehicle, particularly control, restraint, compassion, and a purring engine, to a film that is as much a sad quest story as a thriller of mortal danger.

John Krasinki’s sleeper song of 2018, A quiet placebeginning on day 89 of the alien attack before moving forward more than a year later, focusing on a loving family struggling to deal with their grief and stay safe in life-threatening circumstances.

Continuation 2021, A Quiet Place Part 2They continued their story but added a 10-minute prologue that unfolded on the first day, as families at a Little League baseball game anxiously watched what looked like a meteor streak across the sky and make impact at close range. As parents still rushed to get their children home amidst mounting panic, slender creatures with coiled heads and deadly claws descend en masse, moving at incredible speed to pounce on and dismember any human who makes a sound.

The new film reflects that chaos in an environment that is not conducive to silence. Sarnosky begins patiently, introducing Samira Nyong’o who makes a powerful contribution to her therapy group at an out-of-town nursing home. If her angry resignation wasn’t evidence of that, the transdermal fentanyl patches are a clear indication she has terminal cancer, while her behavior suggests she never expected to be here so long.

Good Nurse Robin (Alex Wolff) reunites with Sarnoski next pig) He considers himself Samira’s friend even if she scoffs at this idea. But he convinces her to come on a group outing to the Muppet Theater in New York, using the promise of pizza on the way home as motivation. Cradled with her inseparable service cat, Frodo, she barely makes it through the opening act of the puppet show before exiting. When Robin tells her that they were instructed to return to the nursing home as quickly as possible due to some undeclared city-wide emergency, she is angry that he broke his pizza promise.

As an initial title sequence, these establishing scenes are quick and involving, and dispense with needless exposition. Most astonishingly, when a meteor shower hits the ground, the city explodes almost immediately, and as Samira staggers off the care bus into a blinding cloud of white dust, the images inevitably evoke haunting associations with the rain of ash that blanketed lower Manhattan. On 9/11. She takes refuge in the theater with Robin and a family headed by Henry (Djimon Hounsou). But devastating tragedy would soon follow.

Despite the chaos and confusion, it is quickly established that the extraterrestrial predators are blind and respond only to noise. The mobilized military soon discovers that the creatures cannot swim, prompting an evacuation plan via ferry from the South Street Seaport. But the stubborn Samira insists on heading uptown to Harlem, where she fights off a wave of bewildered New Yorkers who move through downtown and are sometimes attacked by the unintended sound of a sound.

It gradually becomes clear that Samira’s former home is in Harlem, and that her determination to get a slice from her favorite pizzeria has deep personal significance from a happier time in her life.

Seeing New York teeming with evil monsters – scrambling over buildings and leaving giant gashes in their walls, while the streets are lined with burning car wrecks and destroyed storefronts – leaves a huge impression.

Sarnoski and the visual effects team place these scenes in the best traditions of space apocalypse movies. But they gain an extra dimension from the unsettling spectacle of a bustling Manhattan struck by nerve-wracking silence. Every sound sounds loud, every sudden noise sends a jolt through you, along with a shiver of dread, an effect given amplitude by the discreet use of Alexis Grapsas’ relatively simple score.

Another important character, who comes well into the proceedings, is Eric (Joseph Quinn), a young Englishman who lives in New York to study law. He is found by Frodo, petrified, emerging from the flooded stairs of the subway, and then follows the cat back to Samira.

In a gendered reversal of the usual disaster movie dynamic that’s never quite pressed, Samira is the callous and unemotional character, telling him he needs to join the exodus heading south, while Eric is initially helpless and shaken to the core. They form a tentative bond in her apartment, their conversations—even their screams—muffled by the noise of a severe thunderstorm, but even as the natural intimacy of strangers together blossoms out of tragedy among them, and Eric musters his wits enough to display chivalry and concern as Samira’s health continues to wane, the character is not… Never something as cliche as a white knight protector.

Production designer Simon Bowles and DP Pat Scola (who was also behind Meditation Beauty). pig) Take full advantage of the opportunities that New York City offers you. Places we automatically associate with care and comfort, such as hospitals, turn into potential death traps, as the noise causes aliens to crash into glass walls and windows. The cathedral serves as a place of rest, despite the huge hole created by a creature that smashed its tiled floor, and another creature that was torn from its frescoed dome.

One of the film’s most nerve-wracking scenes takes place in an underground subway station, where an alien uses his long, nimble limbs to run along the walls of a flooded tunnel, while Samira and Erik are carried by the rushing waters, pulling Frodo onto a hastily improvised small boat.

It’s well into the film before Sarnoski, working with editors Gregory Plotkin and Andrew Mondschein, builds up the tension long enough to learn more about the main characters. But even without the poignant insights into Samira’s background and the revisiting of places that were once her own, she and Eric are fully dimensional characters. The actors’ chemistry produces a profound impact in their tender final scenes, made all the more powerful by their silence for words.

Rising star Quinn, a British theater actor best known for his television work such as the fourth season of the series Weird things Or Kenneth Lonergan’s adaptation of Howards End, shows the benefits of choosing a face we don’t already know from a series of films. His sensitivity is so sharp, and his big brown eyes are filled with the feeling that Eric’s steadily summoned cunning and courage almost take us by surprise.

Wolf and Hounsou bring spirituality to the supporting roles, while Nyong’o carries the film on very capable shoulders. Never underestimate the crippling dread that governs Samira’s every move, the actor conveying the conflict between the character’s bitterness and her humanity, remaining stubborn and determined even when her body begins to seriously fail her. She keeps you hooked throughout.

The other star is Frodo, an all-time screen cat who can be ranked with Ulysses Inside Llewyn Davis Or Jonesy of alien, played by two chunky black-and-white cats named Nico and Schnitzel. He has the gentle nature and affection of a good cat, but he also has a keen curiosity to explore unstable situations and feed the fears of humans.

Sarnoski has done a commendable job, crafting a spin-off that adheres to the rules of the first two films by continuing to focus on the smallest possible group of core characters while spreading the fear and suspense factor across a much larger canvas. It also avoids the trap of over-explaining anything, which makes the horror here more primal than in previous films, where the characters got strategic help from learning that the aliens are sensitive to high-frequency sound, prompting them to retreat. .

It’s not often that we get a post-apocalyptic epic that remains so personal, so in touch with human loss as something not just forgotten in the next apocalyptic leap but given room to survive, an aspect that survives the shift away from parents protecting their children . Chapter three of A quiet place It shows that this clever and reliably creepy series, which started with a modestly budgeted feature and has performed beyond expectations, is in no way underutilized.