54798: A Quiet Place: Day One

I get the impulse to burn the system down, to gut society down to the studs and rebuild it. The idea that you can just hit a reset button and start over is appealing. And not just because this is a presidential election year.

Part of the appeal of end-of-the-world movies like Michael Sarnoski's A Queit Place: Day One is imagining what you would do and how you would fare if it all fell apart. It's like that feeling of excited anxiety you feel right before ending a relationship that's run its course, or when faced with a blank canvas. That senseless freedom is the sort of feeling that makes Libertarianism so appealing to teenagers and the 20-something guys who love unregulated crypto and legal weed but hate paying taxes.

But the end of the world gets messier once you think about stuff like cancer, and the treatment thereof. Or electricity. Or food. Or children. Or not being ripped to shreds by angry space dogs that look like someone redesigned the Demogorgon from Stranger Things but said "What if it were more Cloverfield-y?"

In A Quiet Place: Day One, we watch society put to the torch through the eyes of Samira, a terminal cancer patient, played by Lupita Nyong'o. She is an atypical action movie hero, to put it mildly. Her movements are labored, her appearance frail, but her mind is sharp, unsentimental, and angry. When we first meet Sam, who we learn is a successful poet with no family and stage IV cancer, she is in a group home reading an original composition, "This Place is Shit." She carries a chip on her shoulder, along with a fentanyl patch on her side, and her default position on the world is, "No." In many ways, she's an ideal Gen-X hero, one who has fully bought into the nihilism of life and now the only question she has left to answer is, "Will I survive the end of everything long enough to die of cancer?"

Naturally, you can't make a $67 million movie without a few plot twists, and the most important comes in the form of law student Eric, played by Joseph Quinn (who, it should be noted, knows a thing or two about getting devoured by otherworldly monsters). Through the machinations of Sam's cat, Frodo (yes, Sam has a cat named Frodo), Eric joins up with Sam in the ruins of New York on what is, technically, day two of the invasion, and not Day One. Together, they spend two more days traveling from Chinatown to Harlem for a piece of pizza and the last chance to feel connected to life before.

It's worth pointing out that this is one of the most 9/11-ey movies I have ever seen. Fighter jets over Manhattan, dust clouds billowing down the streets, choruses of car alarms ringing out on empty avenues, melted building steel in the shape of a cross, and an evacuation of survivors via ferries from the South Street Seaport all shout out the film's connection to 9/11 as "the day that changed everything." And in this regard, the film operates with all the subtlety of a bullhorn on a pile of rubble. What struck me is how so many of the people watching this movie will have little to no idea about these connections. The most prevalent age group seeing movies in the theater is 18 - 24 year-olds, a cohort with no lived experience of 9/11. It felt like an odd addition to the movie, and one that I found distracted from the narrative, and the real themes of the film.

When it all ends, what do you want to do? The "it" in question doesn't have to be society, of course. When we're at the end of our lives, where do we go and what do we do? The filmmakers seem to be saying that our goal doesn't really matter (spoiler alert: the pizza place is gone) so much as the decision to have a goal. The journey is what is important, and as long as we keep moving, we keep surviving. Filtering this theme through the eyes of a dying woman (spoiler alert part two: Sam doesn't make it to the end credits) refocuses our understanding of survival. It's not an open-ended proposition, after all. At some point, we stop surviving. And that's as it should be. If we're lucky, and if we have good people in our lives, we get to put that end off a bit, and meet it on our own terms. Ultimately, that's the best we can hope for, and one of the reasons society exists at all.

A Quiet Place: Day One is a good movie. Nyong'o and Quinn deliver gripping performances, silently carrying much of the film on their backs. The script is taut and surprisingly heartfelt, and the direction keeps the story moving towards its inevitable climax. It's worth seeing in IMAX or Dolby if you can.