A Quiet Place: Day One review – transcendent casting elevates thriller past formula

In the prequel to the 2018 hit, Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn powerfully anchor what could have been another run through the motions

Lupita Nyong'o proves she's been underutilised in blockbuster fare to date in A Quiet Place: Day One. Photo: Paramount Pictures

–With 2018’s A Quiet Place, actor and filmmaker John Krasinski stumbled upon a powerful formula, one built to inspire a series. The set up is this – the planet has been invaded by a blind alien race that will hunt and kill anything that makes a sound. The only way to survive is to stay silent.

The way that plays out is simple. Again and again, these films run the same play – oh no we have to be quiet, oh no we made a noise, oh no run.

It might sound silly, but with the right actors, it works like gangbusters. But you need a particular kind of actor to pull it off.

Allow me to oversimplify things for a moment. There are two types of transcendent leading performers: Those you love to observe, and those you feel for. And a film lives or dies on picking the right one for the role.

Take Tom Hanks, for example. Hanks’s career was built on how good he is at getting us to feel for him. Cast Away is set almost entirely on a desert island, and the film’s emotionality is rooted in Hanks’s ability to feel like our friend, or make us imagine ourselves in his shoes. Because of that, when he loses his best friend, a volleyball he’s named Wilson, we cry with him.

Actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Cruise, on the other hand, capture our attention, but rarely make us cry. Cruise is always magnetic, but when you watch a film such as Mission: Impossible – Fallout, you appreciate him, but you never imagine you are him, nor someone you could be friends with. He’s something unknowable, but that detachment from us is part of the allure.

Swap these two archetypes, and everything falls apart. Imagine Cruise or DiCaprio in the Wilson scene in Cast Away, and the whole thing becomes funny. Ditto if you put Hanks in a role such as Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt – he’s not an actor built to inspire awe.

The A Quiet Place franchise needs actors you feel for. It’s thriller fare built on near-constant chase scenes. If we’re not emotionally invested in the people running for their lives, it would get boring – or we’d start rooting for the monster, as many do when watching campy horror films such as Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th.

The first one worked because of Krasinski – the former star of The Office who is a born everyman. The second one didn’t work as well because it relied only on his co-star Emily Blunt, who is the type of magnetic performer you enjoy as a screen presence but don’t feel connected to.

That’s precisely why A Quiet Place: Day One, now in cinemas across the Middle East, works so well. The film, set in New York City on the day that the monsters first land, brings together Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and British actor Joseph Quinn as two strangers who band together in silence to survive their impossible scenario.

The film is directed by Michael Sarnoski, whose previous film Pig transcended its John Wick-esque set up by populating it with actors who wear their hearts on their sleeve and treat each with compassion.

He employs a similar strategy here, but this time with one hand tied behind his back. The film’s lack of dialogue forced him to find actors who can accomplish the same thing primarily through physicality, something both Nyong’o and Quinn excel at.

The Academy Award-winning Nyong’o, 41, is more proven in this regard, having stolen every scene she’s appeared in since her breakout role in 2013’s 12 Years A Slave. Curiously, however, Hollywood has largely failed to recognise her as an actress tailor-made for genre filmmaking.

Jordan Peele harnessed her magic perfectly in 2019’s Us, and it took five years for another comparable title to do it again. Hopefully, her performance here, anchored by her expressive eyes and honestly-drawn interiority, causes her phone to ring a bit more often.

The 30-year-old Quinn, meanwhile, is a more unproven commodity on the big screen. Day One marks his first major leading-man role since his breakout performance in season four of Stranger Things, and his work here augers well for his upcoming roles in Fantastic Four and Gladiator II – and hopefully sets him up to grab one of the lead Beatles roles in Sam Mendes’s upcoming series.

The British actor manages the feat of delivering an overstated performance that still somehow feels understated. From the moment he appears on screen in a tattered hand-me-down suit, he looks like he may burst into tears – or perhaps just combust all together – at any moment. With some actors, an overly emotional performance inspires eye rolls. Quinn makes you want to give him a hug.

And the bond between the two lost toys traversing their abandoned island feels believable throughout, made even more powerful because it never veers towards romantic. And all of that goes without discussing the film’s best character – a pet cat who is the best on-screen feline since Ulysses in 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis.

It’s hard to say where this franchise may go next after this soft reboot, or how many more the formula may sustain. But A Quiet Place: Day One, at least, makes it clear what makes this engine purr.