The cat. It’s all about the cat.
No matter what else happens in “A Quiet Place: Day One,” no matter how sensational Lupita Nyong’o is — and she is — her character’s feline buddy is going to take over the story and, likely, the discourse around it.
Mind you, there also was a cat, Jones, in “Alien,” a movie that’s a major influence on the “Quiet Place” universe — one in which aliens land on Earth and massacre everybody for no reason besides sheer killing instinct. John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” (2018) and “A Quiet Place Part II” (2021) laid down the basic parameters, mainly that the creatures’ extremely developed hearing makes up for their blindness, and they hate bodies of water.
But Jones was peripheral to “Alien,” the masterpiece that kicked off a franchise revolving around body invasion. Our fearless new hero is very much embedded in the theme running through all three “Quiet Place” movies: the importance of family, whether biological or chosen.
In Michael Sarnoski’s prequel, Frodo (played by both Nico and Schnitzel) is the support cat of Samira (Nyong’o), a New York City poet living in crippling cancer-induced pain in a hospice. She takes Frodo everywhere, including an outing to a puppet show, where the audience members include a man (Djimon Hounsou) whom viewers of the second movie will instantly recognize. When the invasion begins, he is quick to impart the importance of making as little noise as possible to avoid alerting the attackers.
Somehow borne on meteorites (don’t ask), the aliens immediately get down to their gruesome business. The movie allows us a few good looks at the toothy monsters, who made me think of hellish Giacometti sculptures. But otherwise Sarnoski (who made the endearing Nicolas Cage drama “Pig”) does not add all that much crucial new information to their basic character sheet — “Day One” is refreshingly free of origin story explaining.
Samira is fixated on going to her favorite pizza place, which has clearly acquired the charged resonance of a last meal, even if getting there involves a long hike through a smoldering wasteland crawling with murderous creatures. At least she and Frodo get to team up with the stranded Eric (Joseph Quinn, from “Stranger Things”).
Sarnoski deploys vistas of a wrecked New York with a certain restraint (and no corpses anywhere — showing mass deaths truly are the last frontier in these films), but destroying this particular metropolis has become a cliché. Maybe writers and directors of disaster movies could try mining new locales so we’re spared yet another shot of a collapsing landmark, or yet another pursuit in a subway tunnel.
Indeed, the action set pieces are fine but also perfunctory, as if they were a nonnegotiable item Sarnoski had to cross off a checklist. “Day One” is on much surer ground when dealing with the quiet that bookends the storms.
And it is at its very best whenever Nyong’o’s face fills the screen, like the postapocalyptic heroine of a silent movie. What she can do with relatively little is simply astonishing, and you absolutely believe in both Samira’s despair and her determination. Nyong’o has created a woman whose life force can never be fully extinguished.
A Quiet Place: Day One
Rated PG-13 for alien-induced violence, a cat in terrible danger and the ever-present threat of a poetry reading. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
