Silent sigh: "A Quiet Place: Day One"

The movies are going backwards again. The mass audience took umbrage at the summer's first prequel, George Miller's Furiosa, possibly as it spun off from a franchise revered for its unyielding forward momentum. The Quiet Place films, though, have been so economical in their worldbuilding there's surely scope for a fuller explanation of why this world was plunged into silence, and where the beasties with the bat-like hearing first emerged from. (That Day One runs closer to ninety minutes than three hours - and can thus be squeezed in between the traditional summer pursuits of socialising, sports and sunbathing - has further helped its box-office cause.) Yet Michael Sarnoski's film also finds newly unnerving avenues to explore, this time on the once-deafening streets of New York. The characters in the original and sequel knew what was happening from the outset, and had accordingly developed coping strategies. Day One, by contrast, returns us to the initial shock and horror of finding the world turned on its head, and sets us down among people who simply have no idea why alien crafts have landed in their backyard, not what this invasion means for their fellow citizens, be they of robust health or pre-burdened in the case of terminally ill poet Samira (Lupita Nyong'o). As they all huddle, helplessly watching the unexpected toppling of the Manhattan Bridge, we realise American cinema is still, some twenty years later, working through the traumas of 9/11. One reason for the new movie's impact has to be that it makes its characters' insecurity and vulnerability more obvious and more immediate than the elaborate escapism of Furiosa; the safety net of fantasy has been tugged down, allowing Sarnoski to ask questions that may echo those already floating through cinemagoers' heads. What can we do when the structures around us are collapsing? Who do you turn to? Who, if anyone, can you trust?

If it's any consolation, the film - like much else about this series - proves to have been broadly well marshalled, once more forsaking the wearying quiet-quiet-loud rigmarole of so much of this century's studio horror in order to present us with what plays almost like silent cinema for significant stretches. Sarnoski's breakthrough movie, 2021's Pig, signalled a filmmaker more than ready to finesse and finetune a performance: if you can get anything like modulation out of Nic Cage at this point in his career, you're on something like the right tracks. He's made one inspired pick in Nyong'o, from the word go a more expressive performer than anyone in the first two films - and an actress who might even have been a major star in 1924, were it not for, you know, the general D.W. Griffithness of the industry. The best decision the movie makes is to stay tight on her: when Sarnoski isn't capturing the close-ups that convey Samira's dawning realisation of the full extent of this devastation, the knowledge life will never be the same again, he's at the character's side, resisting the sweeping panoramas of an I Am Legend in order to refocus viewer attention on the struggle to get from one side of the street to the other in a world so heavily and forcefully surveilled. Here is an unusually personal and intimate disaster movie; even the cat Samira cradles from pillar to post, the curious Frodo, seems to be there as a marker of domesticity. You've likely got a pet, Day One says to its audience: how do you intend to care for it when the sky comes crashing down, when you may have issues enough simply caring for yourself?

The results are not nearly as literal as one might have feared, and often intriguingly abstract. Amid this silent scrabble, it may in fact prove a source of some frustration that we scarcely understand where Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn, as the drowned-rat Englishman Samira pulls from a flooded subway, are headed, nor what they hope to achieve once they're arrived there. (Grabbing pizza is about the height of it, and that, in a city so conspicuously closed for business, has the air of an impossible dream.) At this stage in this universe, no-one seems to know; instead, the characters keep stumbling into the kind of run-for-cover setpieces the producers must have insisted upon. Yet if this isn't quite the full Turin Horse, Day One successfully sustains a mournful mood that is striking in a multiplex context - and which develops beyond our initial intuition that, as folks in a prequel to movies in which they will not reappear, Samira and her ilk are most likely doomed. We'd get as much just from the superbly distressed production design (by The Descent's Simon Bowles): a derelict church where prayer would serve no purpose, an abandoned library (replete with one clangingly positioned title, a novel called "Happiness Falls"), a ghostly Harlem jazz bar where any music or revelry would be fatal, all the wonders and marvels of civilisation razed to the ground. With its whispered poems that, within the overall picture of rainy desolation, reach our ears as eulogies, it's a popcorn movie that appears less concerned with engineering jolts and scares than cultivating a certain sadness - the sorrow we feel once we know a good run is coming to an end, when words fail us, or there are finally no words. Despite a jollying final cue, this is the feel bad movie of the summer, in what may be the last summer before Donald Trump and his cronies on the Supreme Court torch what remains of the social contract and force some Americans to live a very quiet life indeed. Sometimes our movies go backwards because society is going backwards, too; their current depression is really nothing compared to our own.

A Quiet Place: Day One is now playing in cinemas nationwide.