A Quiet Place: Day One 4K 2024

The plot focuses on a group of people who are attacked by mysterious alien monsters - they are completely blind, but have acute hearing, which helps the monsters to catch new victims.

A Quiet Place: Day One 4K Review
A girl named Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) has terminal cancer. Realizing her imminent death, she goes on a little urban adventure: first to a puppet theater, and then to a pizzeria in Harlem. At that moment, the Earth is subjected to an alien invasion - the heroine, who is no longer frightened by anything, encounters an English student, Eric (Joseph Quinn). Together with a chance encounter and her favorite cat, Sam will try to survive, to put it mildly, a difficult day. And the main thing - to do it without too much noise, because the aliens are sharp on hearing and fix even the slightest rustle.

New York City is not used to monster invasions - every decade throws up surprises, from regular visits from Godzilla and Kong to the alien creature from “Monstro.” The worse the national security strategy works, the better for Hollywood. But how to fight the aliens, who instantly react to the slightest sound, and even in the conditions of one of the noisiest metropolitan areas in the world? In concept - the main trick of the prequel “A Quiet Place”, expectedly moved from a small one-story town and forest thicket in the Big Apple.

The director of the movie Michael Sarnoski (he directed the rather nice “Pig” with Nicolas Cage) has figured out how to silence the clamoring, screaming and always talking New York. We're even reminded at the beginning that the daily hum in the city is 90 decibels - almost like the noise of a moving railroad car. The catastrophe reconciles, motivates, and educates everyone - only the local devastation evokes not the episodes of September 11 (the cinematography, in principle, carefully avoids any associations in this regard), but rather the entourage of Steven Spielberg's sci-fi films, especially War of the Worlds. There, too, city life was turned into ruins by the efforts of unfriendly aliens.

Among the strongest techniques in the prequel's arsenal is the action intro, which throws the viewer into the maelstrom of cinematic elements familiar from John Krasinski's previous films, primarily through the emphasis on sound effects (that's what you should take seats in the theater for, not wait for the home release). The scale of what is happening is sometimes pushed to the background and given to the imagination - saving on pathos allows to achieve a strong effect. And then, the big tragedy unfolds on the background of a small: for a cancer patient Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) going to the pizzeria becomes the last important quest in life. “Day One” raises the question of character motivations in horror anew and by and large makes it idle - what should the heroes strive for in the midst of the apocalypse? Yes to the simplest of joys.

In the tense sequences, Sarnowski's movie isn't as nimble as it could be. Plus it's pressed by the glory of the two films that came out - everything was already there, and the rules of survival seemed more exotic and unpredictable at first glance. But the prequel compensates well for the worked stencils with the cast - the thrills rather complement the companionship of Lupita and Joseph. The expression of characters with the baggage of heavy fates gives the movie the desired dramatic effect. Going from the general to the particular works - “Day One” does not hesitate to localize the scale of the alien nightmare, and even the most obvious explanatory episodes recede from the plot. The authors are also understandable - the basic points have already been successfully chewed up in the adventures of the Abbott family. So Sarnowski suggests not to dwell on questions and answers, immersing the viewer in the urban nervousness.

Consciously or not, the director will even remind us of his debut “Piggy” in certain ways - and not just in how skillfully he strikes the balance between indie drama and big movie for a round sum. If Cage was looking for a kidnapped pig - truffle hunter, then in “Day One” the main star of the picture is Frodo the cat (the role played by cats Schnitzel and Niko) - an important agent of the plot, not just a cute creature with which the heroine is carried, but also an example of steadfastness of spirit and valor: in a situation where the noise is like death, he does not even risk meowing (audience sympathy is assured). Otherwise, the prequel of “A Quiet Place” works according to the scheme: tell the same story, set the same accents and even step on approximately the same rake. If there are viewers for whom the new movie will be the first in a series, they will probably want to check out the other two. For the rest of us, the prequel is a good excuse to give in to the silent ritual and observe silence. It is loved by moviegoers, now loved by metropolitan areas.