One of the weirder things about living in New York City during the coronavirus pandemic was how the outdoor advertising froze. On the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a billboard for A Quiet Place Part II stayed up for months, even though the movie never opened and all theaters were closed. This forgotten curiosity from a difficult period — as well as many of the troubling emotions I felt living through the 9/11 attacks — came to mind during the latest entry in this alien invasion franchise, A Quiet Place: Day One. As with the others in the series, this is not an upbeat picture, but it is effective and unsettling without being too gory.

As the title suggests, this entry is a rewind back to when the nasty and aurally sensitive creatures first invaded Earth. We saw this in the prologue of Part II, but that was tucked away in a little town. What, you may have wondered, would it have been like in a place that, as the opening titles inform us, hums at a continuous 90 decibels, equivalent to a constant scream?

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski has his PG-13 cake and eats it too during the initial assault by suggesting mass carnage, but with so much smoke and debris, he doesn’t have to show too much. Our eyes and ears on the event, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), is also knocked unconscious pretty quickly. When she wakes up, the survivors huddling in a theater have already surmised that the monsters are drawn to noise, so it’s important to keep mum. (It’s not too long before Sam puts together that louder noises take precedence over quieter ones, so you can talk behind cascading water, as John Krasinski did back in the first movie.) From there, it’s a lot of crouching and freezing in place whenever the baddies are near, a similar move from the other movies, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Sam came to New York on a group outing (to a symbolically resonant puppet show) with a hospice facility. She’s in the final stages of terminal cancer and is understandably sour about her condition. Her prime motivator in coming to New York, however, is to grab one last slice from Patsy’s famous pizzeria in East Harlem (having been there, I understand.) Once she realizes she’s on borrowed time as it is, but without access to her pain meds, her final quest is to risk it all to have one last bite of pie from this legendary spot. (Okay, we’ll learn that her emotional attachment to this place is more than gustatory, but let’s leave some mystery for now.)

Joining Sam on this unexpected journey to her potential doom is her fluffy and extremely camera-ready cat, Frodo. (I suppose it’s the Ear of Sauron causing troubles here.) Also along for the ride is a friendly but a little skittish English dude named Eric (Joseph Quinn) who doesn’t really know anyone in New York City and is understandably freaked out about all the vicious aliens that keep leaping down from surrounding buildings and killing people. The two quickly form a bond based on pure terror (and not much talking) that is the heart of the movie. That’s a real credit to these two performers and their marvelously expressive faces, telegraphing what in other films would require whole blocks of dialogue with just their eyes.

Another good thing about Day One is that you’ll get a really good look at the aliens crawling all over Manhattan from some sky-view shots. We still don’t really know why they want to kill everyone (are they eating the people? I’ve seen three of these movies and still don’t know) but the fear that even the slightest sound will summon them from anywhere is even scarier in the urban environment than in the previous installments out in the sticks. A quick shot of Frodo the cat chasing a mouse implies that, hey, mass murder is just in the nature of these interplanetary freaks.

For any New Yorkers watching, however, some of the movie’s effectiveness will be kneecapped by some of the fakest-looking New York stand-ins you’ve seen in a while. (With the exception of a few shots, production was held on soundstages in the U.K. and in London.) It’s not a dealbreaker — not even using the wrong font on signs for the subway — but it is a little annoying. It just makes me respect movies and shows shot in Atlanta or Toronto that don’t pretend to be somewhere else.

But I get it. It had to be New York because the city is an island, and, as was revealed in Part II, the beasties can’t swim. (Indeed, Djimon Hounsou’s character from that film appears here, and we get to see part of a story he told.) More importantly, though, is evoking some of the iconography from 9/11. This isn’t uncharted ground — War of the Worlds and Cloverfield have this pretty well covered, in addition to the first few episodes of the Battlestar Galactica reboot — but it’s a rich vein for a good filmmaker to tap into. And Sarnoski does this in ways that feel earned, not exploitative.

His previous movie, 2021’s Pig, was another one that could have easily taken a cheap route. That film starred Nicolas Cage as a reclusive ex-gourmet chef living in the woods with his prize truffle-hunting pig, who must face his past demons when his pig is kidnapped. In lesser hands it would have relied on “crazy Nick Cage” and not been the tender (albeit strange) drama it was.

You can see this same sensitivity with performers in A Quiet Place: Day One. Nyong’o walks from Chinatown to Harlem for a slice of pizza even though aliens are killing everyone in the city. On paper, that’s idiotic. But somehow, this movie ends up being quite touching in between scenes when it’s making you jump