3.5 stars out of 5
If you saw A Quiet Place II, you’ll recall that movie began with a flashback to Day One of the alien invasion. But that was Day One in the suburbs. Quiet Place III is Day One in the gritty city. With a kitty.
And Lupita Nyong’o. No Emily Blunt, no Cillian Murphy, no John Krasinski. (Kraz, who wrote and directed the previous installment, here is only a producer with a story co-credit.) So it’s up to Nyong’o to carry the film — and carry her pet cat — and she handles herself admirably. She has such an expressive face, so important in this predominantly silent movie. Nyong’o switches seamlessly from petulance to determination to despair and many emotional stops in-between.
The plot, as it were: Sam (Nyong’o) is a patient in a hospice facility, on a field trip to Manhattan. (Alex Wolff, as a hospice staffer, has some nice moments, but the rest of the cast is pretty generic.) And that’s when the noise-canceling space creatures first attack. The conventional wisdom is to evacuate the city. But Sam, who is already dying, has a different goal to pursue.
After that tremendous first Quiet Place film, it’s been slowly diminishing returns. Yes, the aliens are still genuinely scary, and Nyongo’s story arc almost approaches something artful/thoughtful. Too bad writer/director Michael Samoski can’t really deliver on that front.
It occurs to me that producer Krasinski could feasibly churn out an endless stream of Quiet Place: Day One releases: Day One at the 7-11, Day One at a Lonely Science Outpost Near the Arctic Circle, Day One and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, etc. etc. And now I’m really terrified.
Jack Silbert, curator