Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is the latest film in the A Quiet Place franchise, A Quiet Place: Day One, the prequel directed by Michael Sarnoski (Pig) and cowritten by Sarnoski and A Quiet Place director John Krasinski. The prequel looks at the start of the franchise’s alien invasion in New York City from the perspective of cancer patient Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) as she fights to survive and get herself some pizza. The film also features appearances from Joseph Quinn as a stranded British law student, Alex Wolff as hospice nurse Reuben, and Djimon Hounsou as harried father Henri. The film opened this weekend to mixed but positive audience and critic reviews. Let’s get into it.

Letter Grade: B; while not as tension filled as the other two films in the franchise, it still finds those moments of terror and humanity that have made the series such a hit.

Should you Watch This Film? If you’re looking for a less intense horror film, this’ll definitely be one you can check out. The characters are strong, and their stories make it worth watching.

Why?

                I don’t know that A Quiet Place: Day One is going to be what everyone was looking for from the prequel film. It doesn’t set out to explain the aliens or their reasons for coming to Earth or even set up some initial fight against them. It simply wants to look at another story within this universe that happens to occur in the first few days of the alien invasion. For me, that’s exactly what I needed from it. I was so worried going in that it was going to try and do too much explaining and worldbuilding and lose any of the pieces that make the first two films so good – the human stories. Instead, this film leans harder into the human element, feeling almost more like a disaster/survival horror than the jumpscare-filled home invasion horror of the first or the postapocalyptic road trip of the second. It’s also helped in this endeavor by the strong performances from Lupita Nyong’o (Us and Little Monsters) and Joseph Quinn (Overlord and Stranger Things) who portray their struggle to survive as something inherently tied to everything that has come before them and their own humanity.

                Technically, the film remains on par with the prior films with a strong sound design, solid visual effects, and another bout of creative cinematography that you really only get from horror films. The oppressive silence isn’t quite as pervasive here as in the past films, but in the moments of true tension, it returns to amp up that heart rate just a bit more at each small sound. The creatures feature a bit more prevalently in this film, and any time you get to see them up close, the visual design holds up as something not quite knowable and immediately horrifying. The camera work continues to do a great job adding to the tension of the scenes, and it all comes together so well to give us another strong, if slightly less terrifying, horror film.

                By focusing on the characters, the film does lose some of that intensity that we’ve become familiar with in the first two films, and I think that’s why we’re seeing some of those less than stellar reviews. The first film really blended those two elements together better than so many horror films, and the second continued in that same vein. This one swings back and forth between the human drama and horror sequences more than actually blending them, but it still works because of how well-executed the human element is. Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn play well individually and off of each other thanks in large part to each of their abilities to emote, leaning into the gimmick of these films by communicating so well without words. Quinn plays the supporting character so well, portraying empathy and desperation in equal parts so well, and he really gives the story the extra oomph that it needs to really resonate. Obviously, though, Nyong’o is the showstopper here, showing us from the jump how versatile her acting bag is. Here, she plays Sam as this cynical, jaded woman without any real reason to hope, but she manages to find those moments worth celebrating even as the world falls apart around her, and we believe it the whole time thanks to the combination of solid writing and her amazing acting abilities. By the time the credits roll, we’ve seen her progress through a satisfying and believable character arc that reminds us all of why life is worth living – to eat pizza and connect with other people.

                A Quiet Place: Day One might not answer all the burning questions that we have about the start of the alien invasion, and it might lack some of the horror chops of the previous installments, but it still turns in a decently scary survival flick with a truly compelling story about people, which is the core of the Quiet Place films anyway. It’s probably not going to be what everyone wants it to be, but for me, I can now definitely say that I just want to keep watching stories of different individuals in this postapocalyptic world much more than I want to understand how any of it works. This film is currently in theaters, and if you’re looking for a solid thriller, this is the one to go see this weekend.