99 min | PG-13 | June 28, 2024 | Paramount Pictures
The Quiet Place franchise goes to New York City on the day the aliens arrive. Lupita Nyong’o plays a dying woman who just wants a slice of pizza. The best entry in the series.
Samira is a terminally ill poet living in hospice care. She takes a group trip to Manhattan to see a puppet show. Then the sky opens and creatures that hunt by sound descend on the city. Millions die in minutes. Sam survives with her cat Frodo. She decides to walk across a destroyed Manhattan to get a slice of pizza from her favorite place in Harlem. The mission is absurd. It is also the most human motivation in any film in this franchise. She is dying anyway. She wants one last good thing.
Lupita Nyong’o plays Sam with an exhaustion that predates the apocalypse. She is a woman who has already accepted death and now must navigate it in a noisier form. The performance is quiet and devastating. She communicates through glances and small gestures. Joseph Quinn plays Eric, a terrified English law student who attaches himself to Sam for survival. Their relationship develops without romance or obligation. It is two strangers choosing not to be alone. Djimon Hounsou appears briefly and connects the film to the previous entries with gravity.
Michael Sarnoski directed Pig with Nicolas Cage and brings the same patient, grief-centered approach to a blockbuster franchise. The invasion of Manhattan is staged with terrifying scale. The silence that follows is worse. The sound design is extraordinary. Every footstep on broken glass, every drip of water becomes a potential death sentence. The cinematography captures New York as a tomb. Flooded streets. Ash-covered buildings. Bodies everywhere. The film earns its PG-13 rating through implication rather than gore.
The first two Quiet Place films were about family survival. This one is about choosing how to die. Sam’s pizza quest is the film’s thesis. In the face of extinction, the grand gestures mean nothing. The small comforts mean everything. Sarnoski understands that and builds his entire film around it. The cat survives. That matters more than it should.