A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) review

Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), a poet with cancer who's in hospice, accompanies her fellow patients on a day trip to Manhattan to watch a marionette show when blind aliens with extremely sensitive hearing drop in and start killing everyone that makes the slightest noise - while trying to survive the onslaught along with her service cat Frodo, she partners with British law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) who finds her medication for her severe pain.  If you've watched the previous movies (which were directed by John Krasinski and star his real-life wife Emily Blunt) you should be familiar with the premise, but this is a severely low-effort prequel that doesn't bother expanding on "world building" (or providing adequate background details of its characters) and is content in having its two leads dashing around the destruction and whispering to each other.  It's not a good sign that I was much more concerned with the fate of the feline than any of the actual humans ... although I suspect writer-director Sarnoski feels the same way: after all, this isn't the correct time for optimism, so "daring" to be pessimistic does feel appropriate in 2024.