31 Days of Halloween: A Quiet Place: Day One

2024, Michael Sarnoski (Pig) -- download

The first and second movie create a post-apocalypse world, one where I can only assume that the monsters won, and the surviving human beings are just hanging on until they are killed off. This movie picks up on two world-building elements from the second movie: they arrived on falling stars, and they cannot cross water. If you get on a boat to somewhere they didn't crash down, then you ... have safety?

But that's not this movie. This movie is NYC and the Day It Happened.

Samira (Lupita Nyong'O, Us) is dying of cancer and lives in a run-down hospice outside the city with lots of other dying, older, folks. You get the sense this is a place where poor people without anyone else go to die, alone. Samira is angry and vitriolic, but can you blame her? Even so, care-giver Reuben (Alex Wolff, Old) does his best to tolerate her attitude and announces they are going to The City for "a show", and yes, they can get pizza on their way back. Ah, the highly touted pizza of NYC; to be honest, I wasn't all that impressed.

This is the type of establishment I was talking about in my last post, where characters are built well in short, compressed time, but without any trappings. If this was a feel-good cancer movie this opening would have been top heavy with more emotion, many more tropes and extraneous characters. Instead we get a bit: Samira is angry and in constant pain, Reuben is still a friend despite her saying otherwise.

Once in the city, where the monsters arrive, where the killing begins, where the End of the World starts, it is a road story wrapped in a monster movie. Samira has no desire to leave the city, to survive; she just wants to head to Harlem, to the pizza place she used to go with her dad. That is the opposite direction from where everyone else is heading, to a south end pier, a boat to an island presumably. 

The walk to Harlem reminded me much of the journey in the movie that started this blog, Battle: Los Angeles. Along the way she gets a hanger-on, Eric the Lawyer (Joseph Quinn, Stranger Things), but her only real constant companion is her cat, the only one she truly cares about. But there is bonding to be had, one last vestige of human contact and tenderness. 

And there is a little bit of world building to be had -- the monsters grow pumpkins? We had always seen them snatching away people but we never saw what they did with them. I assumed they were just eaten but maybe they were just fertilizer? But, alas, no significant blanks were filled in, no hints that these creatures probably didn't arrive by accident and maybe are the cleansing protocol sent by another more advanced lifeform?

In the end this was not the equal sequel to the first two movies, despite Nyong'o's admirable performance. There just isn't enough of a movie here, and the tension of first two is not repeated, and if anything, this was a more straight forward monster movie. That said, I have never not enjoyed such movies, so got what I wanted, more or less.