“YOU CAN FIND SANCTUARY IN CHRIST’S CHURCH”
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE tells a scary, thrilling and poignant story. It has the scary thrills the first two QUIET PLACE movies had. Like them, it has lots of heart. In fact, the movie has one of the most powerfully poignant endings in recent years. DAY ONE also has strong moral, redemptive themes of compassion and sacrifice. At one point Sam and Eric find sanctuary in a Christian cathedral. A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is very scary, but without being bloody, and has brief foul language. MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for teenagers and adults.
CONTENT:
Strong Christian, redemptive worldview with very strong moral elements promotes compassion, kindness and sacrifice, the two main characters find refuge and sanctuary in a large Christian cathedral, and the heroine had a strong relationship with her father, which becomes a major plot point;
Eight or nine “s” obscenities;
Strong and scary, but mostly implied, violence includes hordes of alien monsters go after people, alien monsters chase, hunt and grab people in multiple scenes, scary creature calls its fellow alien monsters, crowd of people panics and almost trample woman, several explosions, car is flipped high into the air, two people are swept along by a rapid water flow and almost drown in a subway passage, splotches of blood appear on one white subway wall, man tries to silence a screaming man with a hand over his mouth and ends up suffocating him to death;
No sex;
No explicit nudity;
Brief alcohol use;
No smoking or drugs; and,
People panic when hordes of alien monsters attack, panicked man tries to pull woman out from under a car where she’s hiding, and heroine is bitter when she’s introduced because she has a terminal illness, but examples of kindness, compassion and tenderness transform her.
MORE DETAIL:
Set in New York City, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE follows a terminally ill young female poet who tries to survive one more day in an invasion of alien monsters from outer space to visit the place where she and her father used to spend quality time. A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE tells a thrilling, scary, thoroughly gripping, deeply and achingly poignant story, with a strong redemptive theme of sacrifice, but the story is scary without being bloody and has brief foul language, so caution is advised for teenagers and adults.
Sam, short for Samira, is a bitter, terminally ill young poet at a hospice center. She wears a patch to control her pain. In the group therapy session that opens the movie, she recites an expletive laced poem about how bad everything is. The male nurse leading the session has planned an excursion into the city to see a show. Sam reluctantly goes, so long as they get pizza afterwards. She even takes her cat, who’s on a leash. However, she’s bitterly disappointed when she finds out that the show is a marionette show.
The first act is an old man with a boy who blows up a ballon and goes flying around the stage until the ballon suddenly pops. Before the act finishes, there’s a disturbance outside the theater. Sam, the male nurse and some of the other people go outside to see what’s happening. The nurse gets a call to bring everyone back to the hospice center immediately. He starts to gather Sam and the other people. Before they can get moving on the bus, the city is invaded by hordes of alien monsters from outer space. An explosion nearby causes ash to fly all around everyone. The monsters start grabbing people. Sam tries to hide, but another explosion renders her unconscious.
Sam wakes up at night inside the theater. Everyone is quiet as a church mouse because, apparently, the alien monsters can’t see, but only hunt by sound. Someone has Sam’s cat, but he lets it go to be with her.
Sam soon decides she’d like to get out of there. She wants to get that pizza she was promised. She picks up a helpful straggler, a young law student from England named Eric. The government has sent out word that the alien monsters can’t swim. So, it advises everyone to get on boats to survive.
However, Sam is still terminally ill from the disease that killed her father. So, she wants to visit the place where her father took her for pizza after he played jazz piano at a small jazz club. She advises Eric to head for the water to get on a boat, but he’s concerned about her welfare. So, he decides to go with her to that pizza place.
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE tells a scary, thrilling and poignant story. It has all the scary thrills the first two QUIET PLACE movies had. Like them, it also has lots of heart. This time, though, viewers will be worried about the welfare of that little cat, not just the people.
However, what viewers may remember most about this movie is the power of its humanity. Sacrifice is a major theme in the movie. Also, the heroine, Samira, is transformed by the acts of compassion from the people around her. The alien attacks cause mob panic in the streets, but acts of kindness, compassion and tenderness still occur. Of course, Eric’s presence with Sam results in them taking care of each other.
Eventually, Sam and Eric find refuge in a large empty Christian cathedral. It allows her to rest while Eric risks his life to get more patches for Sam’s pain. Thus, the church gives a spiritual background to the movie’s themes of sacrifice and helping other people. It also gives the movie’s main title, A QUIET PLACE, a great visual metaphor. Ultimately, Jesus Christ is our quiet place, our place of rest. He is the “light of all mankind,” the light that “shines in the darkness” (John 1:4,5).
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is very scary, but without being bloody, and has brief foul language. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for teenagers and adults.