A Quiet Place - Day One

Frodo, Bag In!

A Quiet Place - Day One
Directed by Michael Sarnoski
USA 2024
Paramount
UK cinema cut.

Warning: This one has all the those quiet spoilers.

Yeah, okay. This is surprisingly good.

I say surprisingly because A Quiet Place - Day One doesn’t include any of the main characters from the first two films and neither does John Krasinski, who played the father/husband in the original, write and direct here (although he does share a production credit). There is one character common with the second movie but... yeah, I’ll get to the problem that causes in a minute.

So this one is a prequel, starting in the same hours as the opening flashback on the second movie (reviewed by me here). And running over the course of a couple of days (so, trade description act people... it's not just Day One!). 

Lupita Nyong'o plays Samira, a young poet who is dying from some kind of disease, who has to wear pain patches to keep herself comfortable. She has a cat named Frodo, which she jokingly refers to as a ‘service cat’ (and who spends the entire film either running around by itself, on Samira’s lead or sometimes, in her ‘I Love NY’ bag). When the hospice Samira is staying at pays a visit to a New York theatre, as the show is finishing, the sound sensitive, blind aliens set up in the first film land and destroy New York City.

A new survivor acquaintance of Lupita, Eric, played by Joseph Quinn wants to get off to the docks somehow (all the bridges have been bombed to contain the creatures, who you’ll remember from the second installment, can’t swim) where evacuations are taking place. Samira just wants to get pizza and so Eric accompanies her. Also in the movie is the same character who was played by Djimon Hounsou towards the end of the second movie.

Now there are mostly positive things to be said about this movie and, as I’d heard, it’s a pretty intense piece which doesn’t let the original (reviewed here) or the sequel down in any way. And, if anything, there’s even less plot and character development in this one than the other two parts. In fact, this one is truly a full-on example of the survival horror/sci-fi genre at its purest, in that it’s mostly just about following the characters as they try to stay alive. It’s also excruciatingly suspenseful and, even in the last half an hour or so, manages to get fairly moving as the film plays out.

There are, however, a couple of problems with it and I’ll get into those in just a second but, congratulations for a film which deliberately (one assumes) sets up a cliché but then manages to never play the obvious card that comes with it. And that’s the cat. In the first movie you had the fear that the newborn baby wouldn’t stay silent. In this one, the air of suspense is built around Frodo the cat. I was, and I’m sure this is the case for all audiences, expecting the cat to let out a ‘yowl’ at least once, to inadvertently notify the giant bug aliens where the humans are. And to the credit of the writers here... it never hits that expected point. I mean, sure, the cat often goes off by itself and gets people into trouble when they are pursuing him but, they never once play the seemingly inevitable miaow moment with the feline companion. Which is refreshing.

That leaves two problems of very early telegraphing which, alas, can’t be overlooked. One is the problem of having Djimon Hounsou in this... which is even given away in the trailer and therefore gives you some idea of how the film will end. Since his character can’t be killed because he’s alive in the second movie (for most of his screen time in that film), you kinda know this film is going to end up with him and whoever is with him surviving to be able to find the island retreat he has set up in the second one. And, yup, sure enough...

The other problem is the character of Samira. By her own  admission she’s not getting any better and is expecting to die at some point soon. So this would trigger most audiences into realising she’s going to deliberately sacrifice herself to save someone else by the end of the film. Because why have that character survive if she’s toast anyway? And, yeah, sure enough...

But, is has to be said, these two big spoilers that are implied to the audience very early on don’t really hurt the film any. And, as I indicated at the start of this review, A Quiet Place - Day One is a pretty good movie with some nicely put together set pieces that worked pretty well with this audience member (even though the audience on a Saturday at my local cinema for this one was limited to just four people... so I don’t know what happened there). So if fairly well put together survival horror with a science fiction bent is your thing, then this one is definitely up your street. 

Pig

In The Middle

Pig
Altitude Film Entertainment UK 2021
Directed by Michael Sarnoski

There have been a lot of great movies at the tail end of the current ‘phase’ of the coronavirus pandemic... as everyone is trying to pretend we are more or less out of it and I suppose it makes sense that there is a backlog of good movies at the moment. I’m glad these things are getting released before the government is forced into a corner by the plague again, at least.

Pig, a new film by Michael Sarnoski is no exception. It’s a truly beautiful and moving film which reminds us just how good ‘quiet cinema’ can be, in an age of superhero blockbusters and roaring rampages of revenge. I’d have to say that Pig, happily, falls into neither category and, in terms of the second one, I was quite surprised by that. And also surprised by the fact that this movie is so good it doesn’t matter.

The film is split up into three chapters: Part One - Rustic Mushroom Tart, Part Two - Mum’s French Toast & Deconstructed Scallops and Part Three - A Bird, A Bottle & A Salted Baguette. They actually do, now I come to think of it, have some meaning in terms of the content of the chapters but they’re really more of a distraction and just used as a kind of rest break punctuation to give the audience time for pause.

Pig stars Nicolas Cage as a man who exchanges truffles found by him and his constant companion, the pig of the title, for basic food etc. The young man who transacts these deals with him is Amir, played by Alex Wolff. The basic plot... and this is really all I am going to reveal about the story content because you are not going to want spoilers... is that Cage’s best and only friend, the pig, is stolen by thugs one night and so he makes the trek from his cabin in the woods of Oregon to the nearest village (in a moment reminiscent perhaps of Stallone’s entrance in the small town at the start of First Blood) and finds Amir, who takes him into the city on the trail of the pig. And on the way, bonds are formed, character’s backgrounds are revealed and the movie really doesn’t follow through in the ways you’d expect. This is not a formulaic movie of any kind and, perhaps because of this, it makes for a very satisfying experience.

Cage and Wolff, playing two unlikely companions who begin by having practically no bond of respect between them at first (although I think Amir obviously cares enough about Cage’ character to go the extra mile for him, from his viewpoint), absolutely knock it out of the park in this one. Both of them really bring home the bacon, so to speak, in terms of their performances and you certainly couldn’t accuse either of them of hamming it up (okay, my apologies but I had to get that out of my system).

I knew I was in good hands from the director and cinematographer right from the start. There’s a wonderful shot from inside the main protagonist’s cabin with the open door looking out into the wilderness (a bit like that famous shot in The Searchers, I guess). The pig goes out to greet it’s owner as Cage walks into the view of the opening of the doorway and the two are framed, along with the title of the film, in that thin wedge taking up about a fifth of the centre of the frame. It’s a beautiful composition but I was even more impressed by the next shot. It’s a simple view of a river with the largest area of it at the bottom of the frame and then coming in diagonally from those two corners and tapering into the centre, with forest either side of it. A simple shot for sure but I was impressed because the placement of the river moving into the centre of the frame is exactly where the eyes would have been focused on from the previous shot, inhabiting where the door frame was. This is absolutely what directors and editors should be doing with a widescreen frame, to stop popping people out of the experience and it’s just the right way to compose for a film in a rectangular ratio. A beautiful transition point.

A similar shot looking out from an open doorway in the centre of the frame crops up at least twice more in the movie that I clocked and it’s almost a visual theme for the way the story is viewed. Once, when Cage’s character goes to visit his old house and he sits in the doorway talking to a child and then, much more prominently, later in the film where a diagonal composition of people based on height... of Cage, Wolff and another character played by Adam Arkin... is shown within a centre slab of an open door. It’s a great moment and it seems right, due to the emotional gravitas of the scene (which I won’t spoil for you here), that the director revisits this kind of frame design.

And that’s me done with Pig. It’s an absolutely wonderful movie and I would recommend it to absolutely anyone who enjoys the art of the cinema. It’s an absolutely captivating piece and a reminder of just how good the medium can be as a platform for great art. It’s also not as predictable as you think it might be and takes its time to get where it’s going (even though an hour or more was cut from the original assembly, before it reached its final cut). Don’t miss out on this one.