In Review: 'A Quiet Place: Day One,' 'Janet Planet'

The director of 'Pig' brings unexpected personality to an exhausted franchise and playwright Annie Baker makes an auspicious screen debut.

Kitteh.

A Quiet Place: Day One
Dir. Michael Sarnoski
99 min.

It was a familiar sort of deflating news to hear that writer-director Michael Sarnoski would follow up Pig, his eccentric and beautiful debut feature (and one of the best films of 2021), with the second sequel to a horror franchise that had already run out of steam. We usually have to squint hard to find, say, the naturalism Chloe Zhao carried over from Nomadland to Eternals or the migrant allegory Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck brought to Captain Marvel after a string of socially conscious dramas like Half Nelson and Sugar. (And who’s to guess what from Minari will turn up in Lee Issac Chung’s Twisters?) But the good news about A Quiet Place: Day One is that Sarnoski completely blew the assignment and made an interesting movie, even if he occasionally has to punctuate his own unexpected verses with John Krasinski’s chorus. It’s a loud-quiet-loud formula, like ‘90s alternative rock. 

Krasinski’s 2018 horror hit started with a family struggling to survive on a farm in upstate New York, hidden away from the noise-sensitive aliens who wiped out most of mankind. His sequel more or less ran it back, picking up where the original left off. A Quiet Place: Day One imagines what the original invasion felt like in New York City, a densely populated urban jungle that the titles inform us has an ambient decibel level that approximates a scream. (It’s like Alien’s famous tagline, “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream,” in reverse.) This means a lot of people do not realize that shrieking in terror as these lethal creatures pounce and slash at any noise is the last thing they want to do. And even when it becomes clear that sound is an issue, not everyone has the ability to suppress their panic. 

Working from his own script, with Krasinski getting a story credit, Sarnoski makes an ironic hero out of a woman whose days are already numbered. Stuck in a grim hospice facility around much older patients, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) clings to her black-and-white service cat Frodo but otherwise keeps to herself, shuffling through the final days of a terminal bout with cancer. A sympathetic nurse (Alex Wolff) coaxes her into a day trip to New York City for a marionette show, mostly on the promise of pizza, but their outing is disrupted by an alien attack that ravages the city. Through good fortune and her naturally taciturn nature, Sam survives the initial onslaught and winds up befriending Eric (Joseph Quinn), an English law student who attaches himself to her like a second Frodo. 

Sam and Eric have different goals. Eric wants to survive, which means finding his way to the sea, because the aliens are sensitive to water. Sam still wants a pizza slice. Their bond is rendered with a level of intimacy and care that’s so anathema to franchise horror movies that A Quiet Place: Day One often feels like it’s getting away with something, as if Paramount Pictures was a stalking alien and Sarnoski and his actors were hiding from it as much it can. The big setpieces, when they come, are reasonably well-staged but distinct from the other Quiet Place movies only by the scale of the setting. It isn’t novel anymore and it never approaches scary, though the final shot is a magnificent combination of emotional apotheosis and horror stinger. 

It’s hard to get over the fact that directors like Sarnoski—or Zhao or Boden/Fleck or Chung—have few options in Hollywood outside commercial tentpoles that limit their sensibilities. Yet A Quiet Place: Day One feels almost subversive in insisting on the humanity of its characters and the modest, redemptive qualities of friendship and a New York slice. Casting an actress like Nyong’o, who has one of the most compelling faces on Earth, works wonders for a film with limited dialogue, and Quinn, the standout performer in the last season of Stranger Things, provides just the right counterbalance as a lonely Englishman who strives to return the kindness he receives. Add to that a superstar cat in the making, and it’s almost a shame that aliens have to be part of this movie at all.

‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ opens tonight in theaters everywhere.

Janet Planet
Dir. Annie Baker
110 min.

The phrase “world-building” tends to get thrown around in relation to studio franchises or the latest sci-fi piece of crap, but it’s more properly applied to a film like Janet Planet, the debut feature from playwright Annie Baker, who builds a much smaller world yet suffuses it with astonishing detail. The setting is rural Massachusetts in the summer of 1991, but Baker isn’t making a nostalgia piece and she doesn’t even bother with titles to announce the time-and-place, confident that it will suggest itself on its own. There’s no mistaking the personal aspect of Baker’s coming-of-age story—she grew up in the area, despite most of her plays taking place in a fictional town in Vermont—but the degree to which she taps into those memories is hyper-vivid and specific, present in the country ambience of the soundtrack and in the cheap, mismatched bric-a-brac that lines the modest home of a neo-hippie single mom on a budget. 

More impressive still are the particulars of the film’s central relationship, an uneasy codependence between Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an acupuncturist working out of an ill-kempt inherited home, and her 11-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), who doesn’t make friends easily and prefers to sleep with her mom most nights. (Their dynamic is like a soulful yet defiantly uncool regional theater Gilmore Girls.) Lacy is introduced beelining from an alternative summer-camp dormitory to a payphone, where she puts in a collect call to her mother and threatens suicide if she doesn’t come pick her up. The next morning, Lacy’s bunkmates are so unexpectedly kind to her that she has misgivings about her drastic efforts to leave. Other kids tend to think she’s weird. She’s the type of precociously intelligent and introverted child who will thrive in college, but won’t have an easy time getting there. 

Though classified as a drama, Janet Planet has a wonderful deadpan comic sensibility, starting with a three-act structure that’s built around the dodgy people Janet welcomes into her life. These include her boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), a grumpy and extremely divorced man whose daughter improbably hits it off with Lacy, but who notably does not live with him even some of the time. Other significant figures who pass through Janet and Lacy’s lives include Regina (Sophie Okonedo), a lively but narcissistic friend who’s trying to extricate herself from a cult-like leftist theater group. (They stage fun experimental projects and encourage visitors to take all the zucchini they want when they head out the door.) Janet also starts seeing the leader of the group, Avi (Elias Koteas), who has the kind of deep, silky voice that brings authority to his political and philosophical diatribes. 

There’s an arc here about Lacy trying to find her footing, which also involves Janet learning to draw boundaries and reject her daughter’s clinginess while still giving her the support she needs. In a way, there’s nothing more dramatically important here than Lacy stepping on a school bus and symbolically connecting with the outside world. But Baker doesn’t impose too much weight on this transformation, choosing instead to accumulate details in the relationship that this mother and daughter have together and their interactions with other people, from the three people who cycle in and out of Janet’s life to the comically watchful yet encouraging woman who teaches Lacy piano lessons every week. From the moment Janet Planet begins, Baker has such a fully imagined sense of these characters and this locale that you enter into the movie as much as watch it. 

Baker also turns out to be a sneakily compelling stylist, with an off-kilter way of framing scenes that would seem amateurish if it weren’t so clearly and pointedly intentional. She doesn’t use offscreen space so much as quarter-screen space, in that persons and objects are often slightly obscured, perhaps mirroring the perspective of a peculiar child. Janet Planet has an unconventional pace to match, too, arising both from Baker’s unhurried storytelling and the absence of any whiff of narrative tidiness. Janet and Lacy don’t live their lives quiet like anyone else, and Janet Planet, as the title fittingly suggests, exists in a universe all its own.  

‘Janet Planet’ is now playing in select theaters.