Quiet Place: Day One
(M, 100 minutes)
3 stars
I recently had an appointment to be assessed for sleep apnoea because my partner tells me I die multiple times during the night and my snoring since COVID is at AC/DC concert levels.
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So I felt an added level of terror and over-identification sitting down to this third film in John Krasinski's successful alien invasion series, where the aliens have no eyes and use sound to identify and destroy its human victims.
I'd like to think I'd be fine in a zombie apocalypse, but I'd frankly have until the first time I fell asleep to survive this alien plague.
The first two films followed a small family - director Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt played the parents - whose daughter's hearing impairment set the family up to be uniquely successful in living quietly among the sound-triggered alien onslaught.
This third film doesn't follow that family, it picks up on another set of people and their experience on the first day the aliens arrive and what they do to survive (or not).
Samira (Lupita Nyong'o) is a cancer patient living her final days at a community hospice in Brooklyn, convinced against her better judgement to join her fellow patients on a bus trip into Manhattan for a theatre show.
The performance - a sad marionette show - gets Samira too deep in her own thoughts and she heads outside, along with her companion support cat Frodo.
This puts Samira out into the ground zero of an alien invasion event, as the sky is full of military planes shooting falling objects.
Samira and the hospice's nurse, Rueben (Alex Wolff), are trapped on Manhattan Island when the military bombs all the bridges trying to slow down the alien incursion, and they and the people around them begin to understand what will and won't attract the aliens.
As the military announces over loudspeakers that the aliens cannot swim, they direct the population of Manhattan to head to the river.
But Samira is heading against the flow of human traffic, she knows her time remaining at the hospice was being counted in days and having grown up on the Island, she wants to take a trip down memory lane while the landmarks are recognisable.
While the first two films got most of their scares from the sparing use of sound, set mostly in the countryside away from people and noise, this film is a cacophony of noise and the sound team do spectacular work.
Writer-director Michael Sarnoski made the independent film Pig and he does understand creating mood and building a series of crescendos - I jumped in my seat more than once.
The dialogue is of course sparse though Nyong'o and the film's other significant lead Jospeh Quinn - a lost soul who clings to Samira along the path of destruction - do get to swap dialogue in moments like a thunderstorm that allows the characters a short respite from being constantly silent.
For the human players, this is a showcase of strong, silent performance.
The real star of this film is Samira's support cat Frodo - the feline (actually two, like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, kitties Nico and Schnitzel play Frodo) becomes the film's emotional centre.
Like Jonsey, the mascot cat who survives the first Alien film with Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, the filmmakers raise the stakes on the suspense and horror as the cat struts through blood and mayhem and occasionally right into alien nests.
Is this the kind of kitty to knock loud breakable things off tables deliberately? You'll just have to see the film to find out.
