About the Cat: A Quiet Place Day One
Also, a review. But mostly the cat.
Spoilers in the footnotes. Also, minor spoilers in-text about whether or not a certain cat makes it to the end of this movie. You’ve been warned!
I'm really not into franchises. They’re so often just cash grabs.
That's why I sighed when I first saw the trailer for A Quiet Place Day One. A Quiet Place was truly great; but not really franchise material. The second movie was decent but lacked the capsularness of the first, and honestly hit many of the same beats.
And now a straight up apocalypse version set in a big city? The magic of the first was the intimate, small scale look at a family surviving in a dystopian world. How could an apocalypse survival movie live up?
Ah. But this is not a survival movie.1
(Though can you really fault me for thinking it was? The trailers were all action.)
A Quiet Place Day One follows Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a cancer patient on hospice, and Eric (Joseph Quinn), who are both in New York City when it's invaded by extraterrestrials with hyper sensitive hearing.
They are accompanied by Frodo2, literally the chillest cat3 in existence.
Sam calls him her service cat, which made me laugh. Cats do not serve. Cats are the servees. But I understand why they chose a service cat rather than the more traditional dog model - a dog would not survive more than thirty seconds in an invasion of aliens with superpowered hearing. They are too noisy. I’m sorry, but there are no dogs in the world of A Quiet Place.
And killing dogs is too much of a bummer even for horror, so here we are.
And let me tell you, I was watching this cat like a hawk the entire time. There are whole scenes of this movie where the cat is inexplicably absent, and I was like, SHOW ME THE CAT. I was invested. And I’m allergic to cats.
There's something a bit deeper to this plot-armored cat, though. It tells us something about our movie and its worldview. There's a reason dogs often die first in the darkest horror movies. It signals that this world we're watching is at least as cruel and grim as our own.
So, therefore the cat living tells us this is a hopeful movie, even though it's set during an apocalypse and the main character has terminal cancer. Even though everyone around her dies brutally. Even though we, who have seen the first two movies, know that if the characters make it to the boats at the end there’s no safe place for them to go.
But that’s enough about the cat.
That this movie works so well is a tribute to the strength of the story and the actors’ (mostly dialogue-free) performances, because there are issues. While there are a couple cool scenes4, this movie really doesn't do anything new, horror wise.
It also doesn't add to the franchise. Many questions are still left unanswered. Who are the invaders? Why are they killing everyone? Why did they come here?
How sensitive the invaders’ hearing is seems conveniently inconsistent. Sometimes they are able to hear fabric rip from blocks away, other times they can't hear a person's heart beating six inches from their ears. How are they able to maneuver around obstacles but unable to sense people as long as they're quiet? Wouldn't the sheer noisiness of NYC act as a cover the same as running water does?
This is a little nitpicky and I suppose we have to overlook these inconsistencies to get this movie. Suspension of disbelief and all that.
I find Djimon Hounsou’s inclusion strange. When he’s on screen he’s treated as though he’s another lead in the film—he gets at least one character beat that’s left unresolved5—but then completely disappears until the very end. I'm guessing there's a version of this movie where we follow his family as well. Either that or he's starring in A Quiet Place Day Two.
Alex Wolff of Hereditary fame is also in this for a hot second. I didn't even recognize him.
That's all to say, go see A Quiet Place Day One. It's more than just a franchise cash grab.
What did you think of A Quiet Place: Day One? Leave a comment and let me know!
It’s about PIZZA. A pizza quest. A quest for the last days-old pizza in the world. And also about dying on your own terms and finding hope and connection even in the bleakest of circumstances, but… mostly pizza.
Really? We’re naming our cat Frodo, after the story where a hobbit has to go into the heart of danger to deliver something somewhere… I see what you did there, movie.
Seriously. This cat is stuffed in a bag and dragged underwater. He's inches away from a killer alien. He's flung off a pier. And he's forced to watch a marionette performance. And he never so much as hisses. You can’t tell me that cat wouldn’t be breaking faces and taking names after that subway scene.
The scene where the back of the bus explodes while all of Sam’s hospice-mates crowd around it is great. Also, the scene with all the people streaming towards the evacuation point, but you know that that large of a group of people can’t remain quiet… so tense! So good. Makes a girl glad to live in the Midwest with fewer competitors for resources—I mean fellow humans—around.
I’m referring to the part where he kills the panicking man in front of his son. That sets up some unresolved tension between them.