Death vs. Genre in A Quiet Place

Day One struggles with the tropes, and mostly wins. Mostly.

As I discussed in an earlier review, John Krasinski’s The Quiet Place (2021) is a clever but mostly faithful reworking of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds—complete with genocidal eugenic subtext. The white, middle-class, mostly able-bodied family is beset by apparently superior alien colonial invaders, who (it turns out) have disabilities which render them vulnerable and lead ultimately to their extermination. The colonial Western John Wayne script (they invade us like we invaded them) is flipped and then flipped again, so that the normative western white American fertile family unit is justified in righteous violence against a disgusting, anonymous, and intrinsically weaker mass.

Michael Sarnoski, the director of the prequel The Quiet Place: Day One, is determined to do something rather different. Through a series of deliberate choices in casting and theme, he refuses the obvious colonial invasion narratives and the linking of disability, race, weakness, and genocidal violence. The movie instead functions less as a genre justification of us vs. them, and more as a lyrical indie tribute to found family and the value of friendship, love, and life in the face of inevitable mortality.

Though, to some extent, the chittering, hungry tropes do catch up to Sarnoski at the end.

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The invasion of death  

The protagonist of the movie is Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a poet in hospice dying of terminal cancer. She, her cat Frodo, and others from hospice go into New York City to see a marionette show. Halfway through the performance, the blind but hyper-sensitive-to-noise aliens attack and the city descends into chaos and desperate silence.

Sam is determined to get a slice of pizza from a Harlem restaurant she used to go to with her dad as her last act; along the way she stumbles on a traumatized British law student Eric (Joseph Quinn.) The two share tight escapes and whispered (non-sexual) intimacy before they manage to get to the pizza. Eventually they make their way to the waterfront, where boats are taking people to safety away from the non-swimming aliens. Sam distracts the monsters by breaking car windows and setting off alarms while Eric carries Frodo to the boat.

Sam is Black, and while that isn’t really discussed or thematized in the movie, it complicates the reverse colonial narrative; the aliens are no longer quite as easy to analogize to indigenous or non-white people.

Instead, the blind, emaciated aliens become a kind of metaphor for the blind, devouring threat of cancer and mortality. The larger world ending in a slow slide into silence is an analogy for the quiet slipping away of Sam’s life. You can even see the alien attack as a kind of dream break, as Sam wanders through her beloved New York, which falls away around her into the alien and empty landscape of death. Nyong’o’s incredibly beautiful, heartbroken face, shadowed by fear, anxiety, and pain, is the site of the real action of the film’s parable of precious, short life, and its inevitable, lengthy end. That’s all distilled into Sam’s aching poem, which Eric reads quietly aloud:

Bad Math

You said one to two years and it has been two

You said four to six months and it has been six.

And Mrs. Freelander taught me subtraction

And the corner store taught me addition.

And I used all these simple maths all my life

And I never needed more of the more and less to four to three.

To smaller and smaller.

Until months to days

to hours to seconds.

But not now.

Again, Eric reads the poem aloud, serving as a conduit for Sam’s words so we can learn more about her. This is typical of his role; he has remarkably little development in the film. He’s really just there to give Sam a foil so she can demonstrate her compassion, her courage and her heroism. He functions as a stand-in for the relationships in her life (with her father for example) which have fallen away, allowing her to recapture the best of herself as her self falls away from her. You could see it as a parable of sorts; even in your last moments, you aren’t alone, because your life of connection to others remains with you and defines you.

Who matters at the end?

But this is a horror film, not an indie melodrama, and so the character arc alone is not enough. Sam has to save Eric, and then experience a suitably dramatic end. After Eric and Frodo escape, she wanders through the city listening to Nina Simone on her IPod through headphones . The last scene shows her removing those headphones from the player; as the music blasts, an alien appears behind her, and we understand that she has arranged for her own death.

You could read this as Sam accepting or reconciling with her cancer. It also, though, fits queasily with longstanding Bury Your Disabled tropes around mercy killings and suicide. Hollywood often assumes or suggests that disabled or suffering people would be better off dead, as notoriously in JoJo Moyes novel (and the film adaptation) Me Before You.

In this context—and in the context of the Covid pandemic in New York—Sam’s decision to sacrifice herself buys into a depressing and familiar Hollywood hierarchy, in which Black disabled women’s lives are less important than those of white abled men. Squint and that alien coming blindly into the frame starts to look like the Mammy archetype making a late and ugly appearance.

Casting a Black actor, or a Black actress, to play Eric would have helped avoid these echoes of Gone With The Wind. And why on earth, if Sam wanted to die, would she give herself to the aliens, who she has every reason to hate, and who hardly provide a peaceful death?

Perhaps Sam has to die in this way because, despite Sarnoski’s clever reworking of the narrative, we are still, more or less, in War of the Worlds—and War of the Worlds ends with the violent destruction of racialized, disabled bodies.  Even with genius, talent, and the best will in the world, genre, like death and colonialism, is hard to escape.