A Quiet Place: Day One is one of those movies, the ones with the U-shaped reviews. Lots of 1s, lots of 5s, not a lot of 3s. Either you love it or you hate it. I thought it was a masterpiece. For one thing, if Lupita Nyong’o’s portrayal of Sam doesn’t break your heart, you might want to check if you still have one. Here’s the primary reason, in my opinion, the reviews are so mixed. It’s not just a horror movie. If A Quiet Place: Day One were a book, I’d call it “literary,” or, at least, “literary horror.” The story of Sam and Frodo (her cat) and their journey north to Harlem for one last look at home is at least as powerful, as metaphorical and universal as the story of The Man and The Boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or the journey of Brother Francis to Rome to deliver his precious blueprints in A Canticle for Liebowitz.
If you're familiar with the works I've just listed, you might find it strange to link them with A Quiet Place: Day One. Both The Road and A Canticle for Leibowitz exist firmly in the genre of science fiction whereas the Quiet Place series, despite its aliens, is classic horror. Specifically, a series of monster movies. What all these works, and more, have in common -- and especially what the three movies of the Quiet Place series have in common with each other -- is that each has allowed the characters’ stories to determine the series’ ultimate mix of genres.
We saw a similar accommodation in the first two movies of the Alien series, Alien and Aliens. Alien is a classic horror story of a monster loose in the house, even if that house is an interstellar freighter. The disappearing crew comprise a classic dwindling party, the sort of plot that is at home anywhere a group a people are stuck in a place where they can't run away. ("The shuttle won't take four.") The Nostromo becomes a sealed environment much more similar to the isolated mansion of the classic mystery Ten Little Indians than a more standard science fiction spaceship like the Enterprise or Millennium Falcon. The second film, Aliens, focuses again on a team which is unfortunately dwindling, but we also see much more emphasis on action elements -- weaponry, strategies, problem solving that actually works (unlike the serially doomed efforts on board the Nostromo) and individual heroism (Vasquez, we hardly knew ye.) This genre jump was well-received by fans, who, like Ripley, were more than ready to see a stronger force go up against the creatures.
The first Quiet Place film is solidly in the horror realm. Some have compared its mix of family dynamics and invading aliens to M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. The comparison fits. But, while the individual stories of the family members drive events and reactions to them, it's ultimately the aliens who remain the center of attention. In A Quiet Place, that the father's love and labor for his daughter Regan's welfare become the agency of the aliens' defeat is a beautiful meshing of those juxtaposed plot lines.
A Quiet Place 2 soon meshes genres to become as much Regan's story as it is a horror film. Regan emerges as a formidable adversary to the aliens and she's in no mood to put up with any more of their deadly BS. The film becomes the origin story for Regan as superhero. I was happy to see this story emerge -- Regan's a fun character -- but some viewers were hoping for more emphasis on the aliens and their gruesome attacks. I believe these detractors have missed the overarching theme of both films, that of never giving up, never being defeated. The Quiet Place series has been and continues to be primarily about humans who refuse to cower before the invading hoard.
A Quiet Place: Day One continues this theme of personal determination, but here, the genre needed to tell Sam's story is literary, the style of inspiration, metaphor and contemplation. Sam's and Frodo’s journey, already linked by their names thematically to The Lord of the Rings, invites us to identify with her on the journey north to Harlem and to see that journey as a metaphor for our own. We are as mortal as she is, even if we don't have cancer -- or aliens -- around to shorten the number of our days. Sam has plenty of reasons to give in to despair. Not only is she dying far too young, she has been living with a level of pain that warrants regular use of transdermal Fentanyl just to keep going. But keep going she does. We see that even before the aliens' arrival she continues to write poetry and document her memories. Later, when faced with the need to help a companion find a way to escape the invasion, she becomes a source of encouragement. Despite her illness, she is easily the strongest person in any room. Sam’s full name is “Samira,” an Arabic word meaning “storyteller.” In Swahili, the same name means “one who reconciles.” The film drives home ferociously the truth that our mortality in no way weakens our ability and our duty to pursue our truth and to better the world around us. We have no excuse for accepting defeat or cowering in fear, no matter how many days we may have left or how many monsters may be on our tail.
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