A Quiet Place: Day One - Review & Analysis

!!THIS ENTRY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE!! 

Haii guys!! First blog post on here I am a wee bit nervous but also excited :3 tis also my first time embedding a theme into a blog so. Things may look a little funny lol. 

SO. why not make my first blog post about something I love the most; HORROR MOVIES. 

Specifically, the new Quiet Place Movie w/ Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn. 

REVIEW: 

A Quiet Place: Day One, (referred to from now on as DO) is a spinoff-prequel in the QP universe, set in NYC in the aftermath of a devastating meteor shower which brings terrifying alien predators that hunt by sound to Earth. 

The story follows Sam, a terminally ill woman brought to the city by her hospice nurse for a day out, and Eric, an Englishman who came to NY to study law, as they navigate the post-apocalyptic city in search of evacuation. They're also joined by Sam's cat, Frodo, one of the best parts of the film in my opinion hehe.

Overall, I LOVED this movie, and I highly recommend it to everyone even if you’re not a usual fan of horror. It has compelling characters that you root for from the second they are introduced. Its story is beautiful and heartbreaking all in one. 

It has fantastic pacing, I was on the edge of my seat, excited to see every new scene. Its suspense was masterful and its scares were brilliant, I jumped at almost every one. It has good levity too to balance the scares and heavy subject matter, I laughed out loud at a couple scenes. 

I was pleasantly surprised at its treatment of a disabled main character. Sam is never pitied or shown as weak or helpless, but she also wasn’t exploited for able-bodied inspiration. She is depicted realistically, and Eric treats her with respect and care throughout the film, never falling into a saviour complex. 

Overall, a 10/10 from me. Go watch it pls x 

✱ I’m now going to be moving onto a deeper analysis of the film. If that's not your cup of tea, you can stop reading from this point on! Thanks for checking this out :) 

CHARACTERS: 

Nyong'o and Quinn are both amazing actors and their skills really shine through in this movie.  

Sam: 

Nyong’o’s depiction of the terminally ill Sam in the post-apocalypse is interesting and not something I’ve seen super often in horror.  

Her status as the protagonist makes you want to root for her to survive, and yet we know she is going to pass away soon regardless of the fact the world is ending. Nyong’o’s actions in the film reflect that kind of conflict of survival within her character.  

After the initial meteor strike, she is scared and traumatised, of course. However, instead of joining the rest of the people around her in figuring out how to survive and evacuate, she resigns herself to trekking in the opposite direction to eat one last slice of pizza.  

She knows she is doomed to die regardless of whether she escapes the creatures, and decides to take control of what she does before then. She survives to take control of the end of her life, a life where her agency has been taken from her by terminal illness and being unable to live independently anymore.  

As the movie progresses, we gain insight into Sam’s personality and backstory through simple but effective exposition that feels very natural, which I love. I find in a lot of horror films; exposition dumps can rip me out of the atmosphere.  

In the very first scene of the movie, she reads out a poem in a group therapy session in her hospice centre, lamenting the fact that “everything is shit”.  It's a darkly funny scene that introduces Sam’s cynical attitude towards life, and can be quickly forgotten in the ensuing chaos of the film, but it is later revealed when Sam and Eric break into her old apartment to search for her medication, Sam used to be a professional poet with her work published in collections that Eric finds. Her poetry is another thing her illness has taken from her.  

She shows Eric a poem of hers that was presumably written soon after her diagnosis. It explores the finite nature of life and the despair felt after a terminal diagnosis. Eric reads it aloud and both him and Sam deeply resonate with it. Its meaning has applications to both their futures, the certainty of death and the uncertainty of when it will occur. For Sam, her diagnosis, for Eric, his future survival in the post-apocalypse.  

We learn more about her through her motivation in the post-apocalypse though her motive to survive- eating one last slice of pizza. Initially, you could assume this a simple decision made by a woman who knows she is not going to last long, to eat her favourite food one last time. However, we are shown the true nature of her decision as Sam slowly opens up to Eric, and by extension, the viewer, throughout the movie.  

Sam’s father was a jazz musician in life, and was a source of great support and inspiration to her growing up. He would bring her to the jazz club where he played “the most beautiful piano [she] ever heard” and then take her to her favourite pizzeria, Patsy’s. It's revealed her father passed some time before the start of the movie, which impacted her greatly, still causing her great pain to discuss years later. 

It's clear how much her father meant to her, and the devastation she experiences when she finally reaches the pizzeria, only to find it has been completely destroyed in the aftermath of the army bombs is felt by the viewer too. She collapses in grief and Eric holds her as they both cry. One of her last connections to her father, her lifeline in the apocalypse, gone. 

Despite her cynicism, Sam is a deeply empathetic and caring character, traits suppressed by her hard circumstances. 

Throughout the film, she is determined to take care of her service cat, Frodo. She chases after him when he gets scared and bolts, risking her own life multiple times to make sure he is safe. She grabs cans of cat food for him in a convenience store when she is stocking up on supplies for her journey to the pizzeria. She also entrusts him to Eric at the end of the film, ensuring Frodo can escape the city and live safely. 

She also gives some of her food she took from the convenience store to two children attempting to evacuate the city and keeps them safe in the midst of an attack from the creatures. 

Her relationship with Eric is also evidence of this. She repeatedly reassures and calms him when he becomes overwhelmed during their journey across the city together. She changes her own plan of action in order to help Eric find his way to the evacuation points set up by the army, and in the final act of the film, attempts to sacrifice herself by making noise to ensure Eric and Frodo reach the evacuation boat without being caught by the creatures. 

Sam is a person whose agency and life has been taken from her by her illness. The apocalypse, in an ironic way, has given her the ability to reclaim her fate. 

In the final scene of the movie, she takes one final walk through the city, listening to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”. She stops in the middle of the deserted road, unplugs the earphones from her iPod and blasts the song with a smile on her face. A creature appears behind her, drawn by the noise, and the scene cuts to black, Simone’s vocals playing out into the credits. She has gone out on her own terms, a triumphantly bittersweet ending for her after everything she has gone through. 

Eric: 

Eric is a character I felt a particular fondness for throughout DO, not just for the fact that Joseph Quinn has a perpetual case of looking like a sad, wet puppy in this movie. 

Although Eric is not a character with as complex or with a fleshed-out backstory like Sam, his presence doesn't feel unnecessary, and he does not feel two-dimensional either. 

Eric is shown in the film to be a caring, soft-spoken and nervous man. He feels lost and desperate in the new world thrust upon him by the alien invasion and clings to any semblance of support he finds, and in this case, that's Sam and Frodo. 

Eric is introduced to the viewer crawling, half-drowned from a flooded subway entrance in the aftermath of another massacre at the claws of the creatures. As he emerges, he sees Frodo watching him through the bars of the railing above him. He follows the cat, avoiding the creatures on the main street, and finds Sam huddled in an alleyway, recovering from her escape from the massacre outside and waiting for Frodo to find her.  

The two make their way away from the massacre together, but even when they reach a safe distance from the creatures, Eric does not break away from her. Sam becomes increasingly annoyed at this and attempts to shoo the man away. Does he realise he is going the wrong way by following her? 

It begins to rain, and with the sound of her voice masked, Sam tells Eric that the evacuation zones are in the opposite direction, he needs to stop following her. Eric asks where she's going, and seems surprised when she simply replies “To get some pizza.”, but requests to join her anyways. Sam relents and lets Eric accompany her as the two make their way back to her old apartment. 

While in her apartment, we are given a small look into Eric’s backstory. Under the cover of the thunderstorm now battering the city outside, Eric reveals that he is from Kent, England, and moved to NYC to study law.  

Eric is a man completely out of his depth. He seems to swim in his ill-fitting suit, his choice to study law in the US implied not be one he truly wanted, and a choice that led him to inadvertently have no way to reach his home or family ever again.  

He cries quietly after Sam asks him if he has somewhere to go, “No, my parents are in Kent... I came to study law; it was the only thing I had to do.” 

He and Sam share a moment of despair for their situation, screaming at the top of their lungs when the thunder outside their window booms. 

Eric is implied to have some sort of panic disorder throughout the movie, freezing up, hyperventilating and crying at points. Eric is an incredibly brave and caring man in spite of this though, pushing through his fear and discomfort at numerous points to offer acts of kindness to Sam and to save her too. 

On their journey to the pizzeria, the two must brave a flooded subway tunnel to escape a wave of creatures chasing them. While navigating the flooded tunnels, Eric begins to panic when they encounter a dormant creature. Sam holds his face and tries to reassure him that they will be okay, but a stifled sob from Eric alerts the creature and it begins to chase them deeper into the tunnel. Sam and Eric narrowly escape, but are swept into rapid waters and are washed up in the ruins of a destroyed church. (I feel it's important to let you all know Frodo is fine after this ordeal, he's kept safe in Sam’s shopping bag and is left a little soggy, but no worse for wear.) 

Sam is left in agony after the escape, having been unable to find her pain medication in her old apartment.  

After laying her down on one of the church pews, Eric decides to leave and track down the meds Sam needs before they continue their journey. 

He reaches a pharmacy, accompanied by Frodo, and finds a pack of Sam’s meds successfully. He starts back, but faces a new problem when Frodo bolts from him suddenly into the smouldering rubble of a construction site. Eric chases Frodo through the wreckage but freezes as he enters a clearing. 

He has walked into one of the craters left by the meteors, now transformed into a nest by the aliens.  

Eric navigates the crater and reaches Frodo (who is eating from one of the alien's egg sacs. Ew.) but is forced to freeze when a creature enters the crater with its young. Eric begins to panic as the creatures get closer, but manages to hold his resolve and escapes silently with Frodo and Sam’s medication safe in his arms. 

Eric, a man so terrified and out of his depth in this new world, risked his life not only to retrieve medication for a woman he barely knows, but to brave an alien nest to save her cat.  

He shows incredible kindness and care towards Sam throughout the movie in acts like these. When they find the wreckage of the pizzeria, Eric holds her while she cries and suggests they go to the jazz club her father played at instead. He surprises her with pizza from another shop with the name “Patsy’s” scrawled in marker over the box. He shows her a magic trick to lift her spirits and is continuously gentle and accommodating to her when she needs assistance as they traverse the city. At the end of the movie, he agrees to take care of Frodo and brings the cat with him as he escapes the city on the evacuation boat. 

A man separated from his family in an unfamiliar city in the apocalypse, Eric shows incredible strength, kindness and determination despite his circumstances. His story starts with him terrified and unsure, and ends with him, admittedly still scared, but stronger in himself and on the road to safety. 

In his final scene, he sits, curled up on the deck of the boat, wrapped in Sam’s yellow cardigan and cradling Frodo to his chest. A small smile is on his face as he reads a poem Sam left him. 

“Eric: 

You better take care of my cat. 

Don't scratch his belly. He doesn't like it. 

And don't feed him too much. 

He will get fat. 

And thank you. 

Thank you for bringing me home. 

Thank you for helping me 

to live again. 

I had forgotten how the city sings. 

You hear it if you remain silent. 

It was good to be back.” 

He is safe with the memory of the woman he journeyed through the end of the world with.

DISABILITY REP: 

The treatment of disability in DO is something I am very pleasantly surprised by, and something that makes me incredibly happy. 

Sam has terminal cancer that limits her mobility, stamina, breathing, mental health and causes her chronic pain. Pre-film, she has moved full-time to hospice living due to the severity of her condition, a necessary decision that makes her miserable. She is a fiercely independent woman bound to a place she does belong, a source of incredible frustration to her. 

Throughout the movie, Sam is never pitied for her condition, unlike many disabled characters in media. Of course, the viewer empathises with her for her struggles, however she is never reduced to just them or seen as “the poor woman with cancer”.  

She is also never “Mary-Sued”1 for lack of a better term, at least from my perspective as an able-bodied person2.  

She is able to push through her pain on many occasions in order to save Eric or Frodo, but her experience is realistic in how doing that takes a toll on her.  

After running away from the street massacre before she meets Eric, she has to collapse in an alleyway to catch her breath, a difficult task as we can hear her struggling to breath between wheezes. 

After her and Eric’s escape from the flooded subway tunnel, in which she expends incredible effort to hold onto Eric and Frodo AND stay afloat herself, she is completely incapacitated by her pain and needs to rest in the destroyed church to wait for Eric to bring her painkillers. 

She is a strong, realistic depiction of a physically disabled person. 

Having a disabled character treated with respect in a horror movie is another thing I am pleasantly surprised by. 

In horror, disabled characters are often either fodder for killers, the butt of a joke, or the killer themself (think Freddy Kreuger, Leatherface, etc.). Seeing a disabled character who is not only the protagonist of a prominent horror movie, but being treated respectfully and realistically is refreshing and comforting to myself and many other disabled horror fans. 

In her interactions with the only other main character, Eric, is another thing I love. Eric is consistently kind, respectful and gentle with Sam and the physical limits she has.  

He is curious and asks her about her medication, but does not pry about her condition when she shares she is ill. He does not force his help upon her unless she signals she needs it, and is patient & gentle while helping her move around difficult terrain or if she is tired. 

It is, again, refreshing and comforting to see a character support and accommodate their disabled companion in such a respectful and understanding way.  

1(I’m yet to find a word to describe disabled protagonists whose disabilities are magicked away with unrealistic mobility aids or just literal magic, as is a common trope in many sci-fi/fantasy films.)  

2(I am of course more than willing to grow and expand my perspective and listen to physically disabled folks who have a different opinion on her depiction! Pls do share your opinions if you have any :3) 

HORROR: 

For a horror movie, my main takeaway from this movie was not, in fact, the horror. Thats not to say it was not fucking AMAZING though. 

I doubt I can say anything about the QP franchise that hasn't been talked to death about before, but oh well! 

The use of silence and the fear of breaking it in this movie is masterful. 

With only 1,222 words of spoken dialogue (for reference, this entire document up until this sentence is 3,063 words), DO is a very silent film, something it uses to its advantage. 

DO makes the mundane absolutely terrifying. The crunch of gravel underfoot, the clunk of picking up a flashlight, even the sound of your own breathing can set you on edge.  

At one point in the movie, there is a mass exodus of people through the city toward the river to access the evacuation boats. Although everyone in the procession is as quiet as they can be as individuals, not speaking, walking slowly and staying vigilant, the simple combined noise of feet on pavement draws the creatures and triggers a massacre which Sam narrowly avoids. 

When Eric braves the alien nest to retrieve Frodo, he must hold his breath as one of the creatures essentially presses its face against his to avoid being detected. 

Every move these characters make, every line of whispered dialogue, every noise in this movie sends goosebumps up the back of your neck as you hold your breath to see if it was loud enough to draw the monsters. 

DO is a movie that thrives in suspense, and does so masterfully. It's a masterpiece of terror in silence. 

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✱If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! Although this may not be the most polished or insightful analysis of this movie, I put a lot of effort into it and am super proud of it :)

I'll be posting more stuff like this in future, as well as deep dives into random bits and bobs that are on my mind!

In the meantime, heres my favorite pic of Frodo for you to enjoy as well: