Underwhelming prequel A Quiet Place: Day One speaks softly and carries a big shhhhhtick

• A Quiet Place: Day One
• Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski
• Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn and Djimon Hounsou
• Classification PG; 99 minutes
• Opens in theatres June 28

In space, audiences were once promised, no one can hear you scream. It turns out that silence is also golden when aliens invade our earthly territory, as the surprisingly durable Quiet Place franchise has proven. But now three films deep, it’s unclear what the horror universe that John Krasinski built has left to offer in terms of expansion, surprise and shhhhhhock. I’m all for pulling a page from T.S. Eliot and ending the world with a whimper instead of a bang, but the new prequel A Quiet Place: Day One speaks so softly as to say not much of anything at all.

It is also an oddly repetitive endeavour, given that audiences have already seen what happened the very first day the Earth stood silent during the flashback scenes in A Quiet Place Part II. Sure, there’s an ostensible ballooning in size and scope this time around, with the film set almost entirely in Manhattan instead of Part II’s upstate New York, but writer-director Michael Sarnoski’s take is also conversely intimate and, eventually, limiting. It is one thing to make a small movie, another to make one so tiny it feels redundant.

At least the film’s first 15 minutes rattle and unnerve, as Sarnoski anchors the story from one of the more atypical and refreshing perspectives in contemporary blockbuster history: Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a poet with terminally ill cancer who happens to be in New York’s Chinatown with her hospice group the day ultrasonic aliens make landfall, unleashing carnage on anyone who makes a peep. Sam might not have long to live, but she sure as hell does not want to die today at the hands of some pesky H.R. Giger rip-offs, which makes her initial struggle all the more intriguing.

The opening sequence, which involves military convoys and massive explosions, culminates in what can only be read as an allusion to 9/11, with dazed New Yorkers wandering smoke-choked streets, their faces covered in dust and ash. Sarnoski’s work here isn’t subtle. But just as his feature directorial debut, Pig, found new ways to interpret the cliched intensity of Nicolas Cage, the director tweaks the notion of post-terror trauma just an extra degree or two toward nuance than a more conventional filmmaker (like, say, Krasinski) might, given the material.

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Regrettably, the script – written by Sarnoski with a story credit by Krasinski – eventually pushes Sam to make nice with a fellow survivor, the British law student Eric (Joseph Quinn). Given not much of a personality or back story other than “guy who wears a tie long past the point it is reasonable,” Eric is a plot-acceleration device in search of a character, which might not be the worst thing in the world if he actually helped the story move forward. Instead, the narrative simply pairs Eric and Sam up for a series of increasingly contrived misadventures through the ravaged streets, flooded sewers and desecrated Shake Shacks of NYC.

Not much of Sam and Eric’s journey is all that compelling, or even makes sense – they’re often simply stumbling from one ruined landscape to the next, digging themselves deeper into trouble every step of the way – but at least they’re nudged along by Sam’s emotional support cat, easily the cutest MVP (Most Valuable Pet) since Messi the dog from last year’s Anatomy of a Fall.

Oh and also: Sarnoski shoehorns in Djimon Hounsou, playing the same character from A Quiet Place II but for no real purpose other than to nudge audiences that this film exists in the same universe. Although if Day One’s box-office results somehow convince the powers that be to give the perpetually undervalued Hounsou his own spinoff (A Quiet Day: Day Minus One?), then perhaps it was all worth it.

Quinn, meanwhile, who has been touted as one of Hollywood’s next big things thanks to his work on Stranger Things, seems like a nice enough fellow. Yet every time the actor is placed next to the far more formidable Nyong’o – which is almost always, save one scene where Eric seems to stumble upon a frustratingly unexplained alien feeding ground – it’s clear that he isn’t the kind of performer who can make a meal out of scraps.

Thankfully Day One’s true star does that and more, with Nyong’o creating an entire world of hurt and struggle within Sam’s eyes. And when the actress does get the rare chance to speak? Hush all you want, but her voice carries.