2024’s Most Chilling Horror Masterpiece Is Surging Up Netflix’s Charts

In 2018, John Krasinski went from being Jim from The Office to a major Hollywood director, thanks to the huge success of A Quiet Place. The monster movie’s twist — aliens who hunt by sound — had everyone in movie theaters holding their breath. After returning to write and direct A Quiet Place II in 2020, Krasinski stepped away for the third film. With so many actors from the original films absent (including Emily Blunt, co-star of both films, and Cillian Murphy, who showed up in the second), 2024’s A Quiet Place: Day One could have been a failure. Instead, with Michael Sarnoski (Pig) writing and directing, it succeeded — by getting away from what worked before and taking the tension to new levels. Two years later, it’s continuing to terrify viewers on Netflix.

‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Moved to the Loud World of New York City

When the aliens land on Earth — as shown at the beginning of A Quiet Place II — those first moments occur in a small town. In A Quiet Place, the Abbott family survive by escaping to their home on the outskirts of town, away from people.

Because of all of this back story, A Quiet Place: Day One is thrilling right away on two levels. One, it goes back to the beginning. Audiences will always be suckers for horror prequels that take us to the first days of an alien invasion or zombie outbreak. We can’t get enough of watching the initial destruction as society collapses, never to be the same again.

The second bold move was to put the action in New York City. What if aliens who hunt by sound landed in one of the most populous and loudest cities on Earth, with millions of people talking and honking horns on the streets? It’s a perfect hook. Humanity is slaughtered by the aliens in the pulse-pounding invasion scenes, with one thrilling set piece after another. Even the military can’t stop them. Shots of aliens climbing up buildings show that nowhere is safe, and are scary as hell.

But while that’s all great for an opening hook, it’s not enough to keep a film going for 99 minutes. For A Quiet Place: Day One to be held at the same level as what came before, it needed to make us care, too.

Image via Paramount Pictures

A Quiet Place wasn’t a monster hit just because of said monsters. It’s the characters who suck the audience in after the initial shock of the creatures wears off. We care immensely for this small family, who are still reeling from the death of their young son, and have a daughter who can’t hear the imminent danger. Oh yeah, and Mom is pregnant. How do you keep a baby quiet at the end of the world? When the baby is born and begins to cry, the tension is through the roof. A Quiet Place is a movie about family as much as it is about aliens. The scene of Krasinski’s Lee Abbott using sign language to tell his daughter he loves her as he faces certain doom is the most powerful of the entire movie.

A Quiet Place: Day One keeps the focus on compelling characters intact, without being a movie about family. In fact, its lead doesn’t even have one. Landing Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o is a huge get, which immediately shows that the third film isn’t messing around or coasting on past franchise glory. Nyong’o’s talent isn’t wasted either; she plays Sam, a lonely woman with no one, living in a city with so many.

It’s not enough that Sam is just alone. She’s also dying of terminal cancer, and when she’s out with her hospice group to visit a puppet theater, the aliens come down from the sky and begin their reign of terror. If you’re already dying anyway, an end-of-the-world event might be enough for you to decide to check out now. Not Sam. Her body may be fading away, yet her mind is filled with life. She still tries, for the heart beating inside of her, and for her cat, Frodo. Monsters aren’t going to take her out; Sam will choose how she leaves this life.

All this makes Sam such a fascinating character, and one worth rooting for. The audience knows she’s not long for this world; even if she survives the events of the movie, she will die soon enough. That knowledge adds an extra layer of immediacy where all that matters is the now.

Someone so alone soon finds a friend in her polar opposite, a young man in a suit named Eric (Joseph Quinn). These two don’t butt heads and they’re not blossoming romantic partners. They are simply two people trying to help each other survive. If that’s not harrowing enough, Michael Sarnoski toys with the viewer’s emotions by often focusing on Frodo the cat and putting him in danger. We can tolerate watching a kid die in the first movie, but if A Quiet Place: Day One dared to kill a cat, there’s no coming back from that.

It all leads to a powerfully sad, yet hopeful and fitting end, with Djimon Hounsou added as a survivor named Henri (supplying the backstory for his role in the previous film). A Quiet Place: Day One is packed with well-earned jump scares and brutality. It’s also a film of immense heart. If the aliens don’t rip it out, the characters will break it in the best way possible.