A Quiet Place: Day 1 (2024)
A Quiet Place, Day 1, starring the inimitable Lupita Nyong’o, is the prequel to the very successful horror thriller A Quiet Place (2018). I hadn’t seen the first film when I watched this one, and I didn’t miss it—Day I stands just fine on its own. In fact, it stands amazingly well on its own. In fact, it is an excellent film, though I am not sure I would call it horror.
In the film’s opening we are in a hospice, in a group therapy session, with young Sammy (Nyong’o), who is a cancer patient. Sammy is angry, reading wrathful poetry aloud to her group. Afterward, her group leader tells her there’s something fun going on in the city, and urges her to go. She agrees to go if she can get pizza. In her room prior to the bus trip into New York, we see her apply transdermal fentanyl patches to her abdomen. It’s a very spare scene, very quiet, and very painful. Watching a terminally ill young person, who appears to be without friends or family, attend to her pain in silent solitude is, to say the least, uncomfortable. I found myself seriously considering turning the movie off, not because it was bad, but because watching the tragic waning of a young person’s life in such stark and unflinching terms felt like a lot to me. But I soldiered through, and I am so glad that I did.
Sammy rides a bus into Manhattan, passing by a huge graveyard on the way. We don’t miss the reference to her immediate mortality, death in the foreground, with the city seeming far away, small, and inconsequential. Eventually, when she’s in the city, she realizes that her group leader has brought her to a puppet show. She looks extremely bored by the show at first. But the sound kind of fades out, and she enters into kind of an altered psychic state, she is meditating on what she sees: a small marionette being carried around on someone else’s whim, hooked up to a bunch of tiny strings. She feels to her like she’s looking at herself, all hooked up to wires and tubes, being ferried around at someone else’s whim. The marionette blows up a balloon—seemingly with his own breath, somehow—and appears to rise into the air. He seems alive, but only barely; it's almost as though when he blows the air out his wooden mouth, he dies and floats away. There are tears in her eyes when the balloon pops and the marionette falls to the stage.
Overwhelmed, Sammy leaves the theater to go outside, where we notice that there’s a little more siren and helicopter activity than is normal in Manhattan. I started sweating at this point, because I still remember in my body what it felt like on the morning of September 11, 2001, when there was a slow and steady and then an all-at-once acceleration in sirens and aircraft over Manhattan. Sure enough, soon, Sammy sees tanks screaming by. The hospice patients and group leader all get back on the bus as air raid sirens start going off. Sammy looks out and into the sky and sees hundreds of meteor-like things crashing down. One blows up right near her and everything shatters. The air fills with smoke, and there’s lots of confusion. She sees people getting picked off and snatched away by powerful forces, moving too fast for her eyes to resolve. Then she sees one, some kind of alien. This is not good, she realizes, just before she’s knocked out.
She comes to with people who signal her to be silent. She’s back in the marionette theater with a few hundred other silent survivors. Her hospice group leader is there and has found her cat, whom she had brought with her from the hospice. From the rooftop of the theater, the survivors watch the government destroy all bridges into or out of Manhattan. They are all trapped. She writes a note to her group leader friend, who has also survived, because no one can talk. It says, “I’m going to Harlem. Getting pizza.” The film is, by this point, mostly silent. There is no talking, because the survivors have learned that the aliens can pick up even tiny noises out of the ordinary. Suddenly, in the theater, the lights go out, and a generator comes on very loud. Sammy’s group leader goes to turn off the generator, but gets found and yeeted completely out of existence by an alien. Sammy is horrified as she sees this happen, but she cannot scream. No voice, no talking, no screaming.
The next powerful thing about this film, then, is the agony of enforced silence. Next after the excruciatingness of a slow, disempowered death.
Yes, sure, it’s also a film about an alien species that attacks the earth. But first and foremost, it’s about the unspeakability of trauma, and how it feels to live with a constant agony that cannot be voiced. Or cannot be voiced adequately.
The central emotional paradox of the film, of course, is that Sammy’s terminal cancer diagnosis—a horrific and unspeakable trauma, especially for someone so young—has trained her for this, helped her understand the problem of voicing fear and pain, and how to live in a kind of brutal, suffocating silence, knowing that death is coming at you fast, from every direction. She is ready for this world of sound-probing aliens, in a way almost no one else is. And, of course, like her, we know that she has much less life to lose than most people; she’s going to die in the next short while regardless of whether an alien predator picks her off or not.
With her friend gone, Sammy takes off into the city alone, hits a store for supplies, and walks out into the totally burned, decimated city. She really is going to go and get pizza. Because she’s dying, and there’s nothing for it, and nothing more can or should be said about it. She encounters two little kids, hiding under the sound-screening waterflow of a fountain. She gives them her food. Together, they hear an announcement about evacuation at South Street Seaport. The announcement says that the attacking aliens cannot swim. Crowds of totally silent people process downtown, huge crowds of shuffling, wounded, desperate, but voiceless people.
Seeing this, and realizing that even if these people escape, her escape will only bring her to death elsewhere, Sammy decides to walk back uptown. She’s getting that pizza, and she sends the two children off alone. The streets are packed people, when the creatures suddenly attack. Sammy is thrown to the ground. Her cat is lost; she crawls under a car, which starts to fall on her. She escapes, and her cat finds her, as does a man named Eric. It begins to rain, giving them sound cover from the aliens. Quietly, she tells Eric to go to South Street Seaport for the evacuation. But he is very afraid. He says he’s not from New York, not even American. He has no friends or family, and he doesn’t want to be alone. Despite her efforts to get rid of him, he follows her. They take shelter in a building, which turns out to be her apartment. He finds out that she’s a poet, and that she’s dying. And that she wants pizza. He wants to go with her. As the thunderstorm intensifies, they start screaming in unison with the thunder
The next powerful thing this film is about is the kind of intimacy that emerges from shared trauma.
Eric and Sammy don’t know each other. They have nothing in common. And yet they decide to team up together, screaming when they can, their voices blurred by thunderclaps, but mostly in total silence. Oh my God, I realized, this movie is beautiful.
After a series of harrowing near misses with the aliens, Sammy and Eric wind up in a church. She is in excruciating pain, because she’s run out of her cancer medications and pain management. He picks up her poetry notebook, and writes in it, “What meds do you need.” This man, this random English man who happened to be in New York on the day of an interstellar assault, decides to risk his life to get cancer and pain medication for a woman who is a total stranger to him. Except, of course, the point of the film is that she is not a total stranger to him. They have something profound in common, which has made them friends: they are both staring down the immanent threat of mortality, and they both made the decision to be human beings to each other, even so. Eric, terrified, goes out into the world to find a pharmacy, because he doesn’t want Sammy to suffer, and because he doesn’t want to lose her. He makes it back—just barely—and medicates her.
The next powerful thing this film, then, is care. What it is to care for another human being. Sammy cared for Eric and gave him shelter, reminding him of his humanity. Eric gives Sammy care by procuring and administering her medication and helping her want to live as long as she can.
Eventually Eric manages to bring Sammy a pizza, as they continue to rove around the city in silence. He silently does a magic card trick for her. She gives him her sweater. This is all done in total silence.
They decide to head to the South Street Seaport to try to escape with the rescue vehicles. He panics at the last minute, terrified of being killed by the aliens; she gives him her cat, both for his comfort, and also because—as we now realize—she has no intention of trying to escape, but she does want her cat to live.
In what was, for me, the most powerful scene of the film, Sammy then goes on a noise making rampage—breaking car windows, setting off car alarms, throwing things—to give Eric and the cat a chance to escape. But, of course, her decision to make as much noise as she can also speaks to her pain about her own immanent mortality. She’s not going to be silent now, not going to turn her pain and rage inward, silently, refusing to voice it. She’s going to make as much noise as she can.
Eric makes it to the water and the people on the ferry shout to stop the boat and rescue him—it appears the aliens cannot survive in water for long at all, so once he and the cat are swimming, they’re ok. The boat people shout encouragement to him as he looks back at Sammy in silence. He makes it to the boat, and is pulled up by a Black man—the same man who had initially survived the attack in the marionette theater with Sammy and her group leader. He says, “you’re safe.” The two men embrace each other. Vigorously, but tenderly, almost passionately. You’re safe: the ultimate love language for traumatized people.
Eric then finds a note from Sammy in the sweater pocket “Eric, you better take care of my cat. Don’t rub his belly. He doesn’t like that. And don’t feed him too much. He’ll get fat. And thank you thank you for bringing me home. Thank you for helping me live again. I’d forgotten how the city sings. You can hear it when you’re quiet.” The final shots are of her, walking around the city alone, listening to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” on her iPod. This just happens to be one of my all-time favorite songs, but in case you’re not familiar with the lyrics, here’s a snippet:
Birds flying high, you know how I feel.
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel.
Breeze drifting on by, you know how I feel.
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life
For me, yeah!
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life
For me, ooh, and I’m feeling good!
Sammy, dying of cancer and stalked by malevolent aliens, is feeling good. But it’s more than that. She’s feeling good—as the song intones—because of a sense of profound empathy between herself and the natural world around her. The birds, the sun, the breeze; they all know how she feels. Helped by Simone’s song, Sammy feels like she’s a part of something larger than herself. She feels united with air, light, and song. She feels integrated, whole, unseparate. And as a result of her renewed sense of wholeness with the world, she becomes unafraid. Unafraid of death, unafraid of herself, unafraid of what’s around her.
At the last instant of the film, she faces the camera, and she unplugs her iPod loudly, making a mechanical click. In the background, we see an alien land behind her. She knows it, but she doesn’t turn to look. She is committing suicide. Suicide by sound.
So, no, I’m not really sure I want to call this film horror. I think instead I want to call it an essay on trauma, mortality, vulnerability, care, and integration.