Permission to Scream
"A Quiet Place: Day One" isn't just a really good thriller. It's a parable.
This essay contains some spoilers for A Quiet Place: Day One and other movies in the franchise.
Imagine living in a world where making the slightest sound can get you eviscerated by monsters. That’s the premise behind 2018’s A Quiet Place and the other movies in the Quiet Place franchise.
The first film, directed by and starring John Krasinski, focused on a single family fighting for survival on their farm in post-apocalyptic America. The second film, 2020’s A Quiet Place Part II, continues the family’s story as they cautiously venture into nearby territory. Both films are solid, well-crafted thrillers.
The latest entry in the franchise, this year’s A Quiet Place: Day One, is a prequel. It doesn’t feature any of the previous characters — minus one very small part — and it trades the rural setting of the first two for Manhattan. Because of this, it feels like something wholly different, even though it shares the same basic premise.
On paper, it sounds like a cash grab — let’s start the whole thing over with a story based on some passing dialogue from the second movie — but it’s actually more than that. It feels like a parable for what it means to be human.
Lupita Nyong’o plays Samira, a terminally ill woman — and former poet — living in a hospice facility with her cat, Frodo. When she has a chance to go to Manhattan for a day, all she wants out of the trip is a slice of pizza. Instead, all hell breaks loose. From there, the movie follows Samira as she navigates Manhattan’s glass-strewn streets and flooded subways, trying to evade Earth’s new occupants.
Along the way, she picks up Eric (Joseph Quinn), an Englishman studying law in the U.S. Initially, Samira treats him like a stray dog, trying her best to lose him. But in the end, they help each other find what the other is looking for. In Eric’s case, it’s a way out of Manhattan. For Samira, who has no intention of leaving, it’s that slice of pizza — which isn’t just a slice of pizza, but, as Samira seems to know, her last meal.
The story is concise, as parables tend to be, relying on sparse but well-chosen details to communicate something larger than the sum of its parts. Thrills aside, Day One is a good Samaritan tale in genre clothing. It’s about kindness and empathy in the face of trauma and choosing to treat another person’s life as more important than your own.
Even though Day One comes before the other films chronologically, it feels much more like the culmination of a question posed by its predecessors: How do we connect with other people in a world where our voices have been silenced?
Subtextually, A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II feel like reflections of the Trump era, where speaking out against a certain wanna-be fascist can be enough to get you trolled, doxxed, or swatted. If you’re prone to anxiety the way I am, silence equals safety. No one can hurt you if you don’t make a sound.
Under these conditions, the best you can do is look out for yourself and the people closest to you. That’s what the characters in the first two Quiet Place movies have to do because society is already too far gone.
The circumstances of Day One aren’t all that different, but the action is less insular. Samira and Eric are on their own. Because they don’t have family to look out for, no one would blame them for looking out for themselves. But instead, they look out for each other. In this sense, Day One feels more reflective of the Biden era. The dangers are still the same, but the emphasis is different. It’s not about people who are already on the same side; it’s about strangers who find a way to bridge the gulf between them and are changed in the process.
There’s a particular scene about midway through Day One that stands out.
The two main characters are holed up in Samira’s apartment during a storm. Because of all the noise from the rain and thunder, they can actually talk to one another. They share a bit about their pasts, and Eric reads one of Samira’s poems, which is about the way cancer has turned what’s left of her life into a countdown. Eric breaks down as he reads it, knowing that his own life — all life, in fact — is in countdown mode now.
This isn’t what was supposed to happen. The cancer. The aliens. Life wasn’t supposed to go in this direction, yet here they are. And under the cover of thunder and lightning, they scream. The noise gives them permission to.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that same urge to scream — and it comes from a similar place. Since November 2016, it feels like we’ve been living in Biff Tannen’s Hill Valley. A timeline that was never meant to exist but somehow, somewhere along the way, was willed into existence by one man’s ego and greed. That’s a different franchise, but I think you get me.
Screaming can be therapeutic, and for Samira and Eric, it cements their bond. That’s what sitting with shared pain does to people. It doesn’t erase what’s different about them, but it highlights what they share. And it creates space for what I think is the movie’s answer to that question: How do we connect with other people when our voices have been silenced? It’s the same as it’s always been — with empathy and action.