Lupita Nyong’o Redefines the Meaning of Death in ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’

‘A Quiet Place: Day One,’ released by Paramount Pictures, is a genre-bending horror film that redefines death for lead character, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), in an apocalyptic New York City. Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o enthralls the viewer with stellar performances of quietness, care, resilience, and sacrifice in the face of an alien invasion that demands silence from a cacophonous New York City. In this prequel to ‘A Quiet Place’ film series, director Michael Sarnoksi takes fans back to the beginning where it all began: an explosion, a hunt, silence, and sacrifice. Nyong’o’s evocative performance as a terminally ill character who insists on reuniting with her late father, highlights the multiplicity of the apocalypse in the film and defines death as a reconnection to life.

The film begins with Sam in a hospice center and the introductory camera techniques foreshadow the apocalyptic atmosphere. Somber colors foretell the doom expected to plague this community shortly after aliens invade the city. Closeup camera shots of Sam’s flesh engulf us and make her dying experience intimate with the viewer, while the literal silence throughout the film demands our own silence and draws us into the diegesis. These introductory techniques set the stage for Sam’s refusal of death to emerge.

Sam’s mean demeanor at the hospice center meeting and her insistence for traveling to the city for pizza foreshadow her refusal of the upcoming apocalypse and the meaning of death it imposes on the city. Her practice of refusal continues throughout the film and emphasizes her resilience in the face of calamity. We witness her refusal to leave the city before getting pizza, her refusal to abandon her cat during the alien invasion, her refusal to remain silent during a thunderstorm, and her refusal to forget the memory of her late father and their shared love for New York City pizza. Her senseless insistence to eat pizza during an alien invasion becomes sensible when the film connects her hunger for pizza to her refusal of her father’s death. 

Sam’s refusal advances the plot and redefines the death surrounding her terminally ill Black body living through an apocalyptic world as a reconnection to life. Throughout the film, Sam’s biggest fear is not the ending of her own life; rather, she fears the end of her cat’s life. By the end of the film, she makes the ultimate sacrifice after finally securing her cat’s safety, eating pizza, and visiting the jazz club in Harlem where her late father used to play the piano. Perhaps, Sam’s world-ending, catastrophic event is not the alien invasion or even her own illness. Perhaps, her world ended when her father died.

Sam’s elated reconnection with pizza and by extension, to her father, refuses death as an end to life. For Sam, death is a reconnection to life, and her self-sacrifice at the end of the movie reunites her and her father in the afterlife.

This film wrestles with the juxtaposition of sound and silence to create a beautiful message about life and death amid world-ending disaster. It is certainly a film worth watching this summer.

‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ in theaters now.

—Dominique Young