A Quiet Place: Day One – the 'pleasant surprise of the summer'

An apocalyptic thriller about deadly alien invaders who are blind but have ultra-sonic hearing, "A Quiet Place" (2018) "tapped into that collective childhood memory of stern teachers or parents warning us not to make a peep", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Now, following 2020's "excellent" "A Quiet Place: Part II", we have a prequel, showing how the horror began – and it's magnificent. 

Directed this time by Michael Sarnoski, it stars a superb Lupita Nyong'o as Sam, a poet with terminal cancer who is visiting New York with her pet cat Frodo when the aliens attack, and who is soon warned to "Shhh!" – because it has become clear that to have any hope of surviving, you must not make a sound. 

Sam, however, is dying anyway, and is determined to have one last slice of pizza, so she sets off through the sci-fi hellscape to reach a restaurant in Harlem, with a needy English law student (Joseph Quinn) she has picked up along the way. The result is one of the finest films of the year – gripping, immaculately paced, and surprisingly touching.

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"Day One" is "well made and well acted", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But "the hideous novelty" of the set-up "is leaking a little from" what we must now call the "A Quiet Place franchise". 

The film is perhaps not "desperately" bold or innovative, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. As the third part, it was never likely to be. But, as our two protagonists pick their way through "the wreckage of Manhattan", it does enough "to keep viewers' hearts at constant throat altitude". 

This film is the "pleasant surprise of the summer so far". See it in a cinema, because part of the fun is being in an audience trying to maintain "the collective hush". And don't bring crisps.