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One of the many things I liked about A Quiet Place was how it didn’t feel the need to show us the aliens arriving on Earth. Instead we were able to focus immediately on the family fighting to survive on a planet now overrun with eyeless but vicious monsters. Then at the start of A Quiet Place 2, when they clearly had a bigger budget to play with, they showed us what the initial invasion looked like and it was a nice little addition before the focus thankfully returned to the central players and their ongoing struggle to maintain the silence necessary to stop themselves being picked off by these unstoppable otherworldly predators. To be fair, I didn’t need to see day one then and I don’t really need to now.

Fortunately, despite the title, that isn’t really the focus of this new film in the series. It doesn’t even all take place on a single day. It is interesting to see the characters in this movie (almost entirely different characters to the other two films) living their lives before the attack as it offers some important context for one of them but the main draw here is seeing it all go down in a metropolitan rather than a rural one. We certainly don’t learn any more about the aliens; they fall from the sky and immediately start running around and killing people, that’s the whole backstory and we knew that already. We don’t even see how the humans discover that the creatures are blind and that staying quiet is their only hope against them, which if I’m honest is a bit of an omission.

Ultimately I’m not sure what the different setting adds either. They make a thing of how New York has a constant decibel reading of about 90 which is the same noise level as a human scream, which is an interesting idea/association, but the place falls quiet and the city becomes strangely deserted pretty quickly once everything kicks off. What we do get is a story of other people fighting to survive on a planet now overrun with eyeless but vicious monsters which is almost as compelling this time as it has been previously. There is most certainly a version of this film that has nothing to do with the other Quiet Place films but these monsters are as good as any other and Hollywood doesn’t like original IP so so be it.

Actually A Quiet Place Day One has a quite different sensibility to its predecessors. Don’t go in expecting a big action film and don’t hold out for the same level of suspense as the other two films. The movie is too reliant on scenes of people crouching quietly behind things as the beasties stalk around them and it does have some moments where narrative necessity wins out over realism (two things; folded paper notes are generally not readable after they have been submerged in river water, and cats are not silent animals, especially after they have also been submerged in river water).

When the film succeeds is in that focus on the humans at the centre of everything. Lupita Nyong’o is brilliant as the lead and her circumstances add to her performance and the story. Joseph Quinn is also good, approaching these stranger things very differently to the ones he faced before. It takes a while to build but by the end their story has become quite moving.

Despite more money being thrown at it again, this movie is clearly a side project from the main Quiet Place story with Part 3 of Emily Blunt’s adventures coming later, and I’m sure that is how it will stay. I don’t think it is essential viewing and might even be a bit slow in places but it has nice moments and is worth a watch on a big screen or later on home viewing. No need to shout about it but it’s still quietly compelling.

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