Highlights
- A Quiet Place: Day One follows Sam's grief-filled journey in hospice care and her struggle to survive in a city overrun by aliens.
- The movie features several onscreen and offscreen deaths, including accidental ones, as characters navigate the dangers of the alien invasion.
- Sam's final decision to signal the aliens to end her life is a poignant and potentially controversial ending, leaving the audience wondering if she survives or not.
A Quiet Place: Day One begins as a small movie about grief. The main character, Sam, is in hospice and miserable at that. All she wants is to die peacefully and to get her cat, Frodo, a new home. Also, she loves the idea of getting pizza and visiting her home turf of Harlem one last time.
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While those dreams look like they are in sight, they are torn away from Sam in A Quiet Place: Day One once the aliens arrive. This leads to some horrific deaths onscreen and offscreen. Let’s go through the numbers with spoilers in full force.
This list contains spoilers!
6 The First Strike
What Happens When New York Is In Crisis?
The start of A Quiet Place: Day One is depressing because it follows the protagonist, Sam, in hospice care. Even an outing in New York City takes a depressing turn as she doesn’t get to see a movie but a puppet show instead. Then, it gets worse as a blast erupts.
Sam exits her bus and is confused, sifting through dust and wreckage to find safety. All the while, people are being ripped away by an unknown force. No blood or gore is in the scene, but these kills paint the picture that this is an intense horror movie.
5 Panicked Guy
Henri Takes A Stand
Not all of the killings are perpetrated by these aliens. One is an accident, and it may be the most brutal kill in the movie. When the military blows the bridges leading out of the city, one of the survivors starts to panic and scream.
At this point, everyone knows that the aliens can sense sound. So, Henri runs over to keep this other survivor’s mouth shut, but he won’t cave in easily. In the struggle, Henri accidentally bashes the other guy’s head into a wall, and he dies instantly. It’s a dark turn relatively early for a likable hero, even if it was an accident.
4 Reuben
A Shirt Rips Too Loud
Even though Reuben sort of lies to Sam, he is a sweet character. It’s clear he at least cares for her, even though Sam hates the world and everything in it. Everything besides her cat Frodo, that is, who has to be a reference to the Lord of the Rings character.
Reuben is set up to be Sam’s companion throughout the movie, but he dies quickly. At the puppet theater, the power dies, and then the generator heats up. As it makes a lot of noise, Reuben and Sam run downstairs to shut it off. In the process, Reuben rips his shirt, which is apparently loud enough to attract the aliens, and he gets absolutely destroyed.
3 The Car Guy
Claustrophobia To The Max
The first attack on the city is intense but there are a lot of small moments after this. Eventually, there is a message from the military instructing survivors to head to the bay. The monsters don’t like water so the plan is to boat everyone elsewhere. That’s when a big shuffling mass of people started to shuffle down the streets of New York City.
It’s eerie and straight out of a zombie movie. Eventually, someone makes too much noise and it attracts the aliens again. Sam hides under a car and someone tries to grab her, pleading to help him. Unfortunately, he gets ripped away and almost causes Sam to get crushed too.
2 Alien
A Villain Gets A Watery Grave
Not all deaths are caused by aliens, as Henri was an example of. Also, not all deaths are humans in the movie because there is one confirmed alien death. Sam and Eric, a companion who decides to follow Sam later on, wind up in the sewers.
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They are being stalked by a monster, but in its pursuit, it takes on too much water and dies. As a villain in the movie, viewers aren’t supposed to care about one of these things dying. It’s triumphant but still horrifying to witness. No one wants to die in a drowning incident.
1 Sam
Feeling Good
This last death may be a bit controversial with fans of the movie. They spent the entire runtime of A Quiet Place: Day One cheering for Sam to pull through even with her illness in a city filled with horrific creatures. In the end, she splits from Eric, giving Frodo to him, and then she peaces out. The final scene of the movie shows Sam pulling out her earbuds and iPod Nano from its boom box to signal the monsters to come find her.
She chooses suicide by way of aliens, but the scene cuts to black before anything happens. It’s hard to believe she is alive, and if she does die, it’s a brutal way to go. That said, so is her illness, so maybe an alien claw is swifter and more peaceful in some regard.
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