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Review: A Quiet Place: Day One’s Frodo The Cat Steals The Show

A rare prequel that matches or exceeds the original, Day One explores relationships feline and human in a harrowing, life-or-death situation. With its Manhattan setting and post-apocalyptic vibe, the film also invites comparisons to the chaos and insanity of 9/11, when shocked survivors were just beginning to grapple with what they’d experienced.

If there’s one thing director Michael Sarnoski knows about cat people, it’s that putting a feline in danger is a reliably manipulative way to ratchet up tension.

Frodo the cat, therapy pet to Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam in A Quiet Place: Day One, is every bit the handsome co-star.

In a story about a woman and her cat trying to survive an apocalyptic event in New York City, the cat gets plenty of screen time. There are entire sequences following the little guy as he dashes away from danger (and sometimes toward it) and as he follows his feline instincts, which might not be the right instincts in a world that suddenly has its rules rewritten.

A Quiet Place: Day One is the third installment of the Quiet Place films. The first one thrilled audiences with a tight script, tense acting and a quiet/loud dynamic that made the absence of sound more sinister than sound itself.

A Quiet Place (2018) and its sequel (2020) take place about 16 months after the arrival of monstrous creatures of indeterminate origin. The aliens are blind, but that doesn’t impede their ability to rampage through human cities. They have an unearthly sensitivity to sound and can echolocate. Even a whisper can be enough to draw their attention if they’re in relatively close proximity.

We meet the Abbott family (John Krasinski, Emily Blunt and their children) some 16 months after the initial invasion, when they’re living silently on their isolated farm in upstate New York.

The audience is told nothing about where the creatures came from or what they are, and except for a short sequence in the very beginning of the sequel, we don’t see their arrival. The first two films deal exclusively with the aftermath, with scattered survivors trying to eke out an existence.

Frodo the Cat — A curious Frodo watches Quinn’s character, Eric, emerge gasping from a flooded subway station. Credit: Paramount

Day One is a different beast entirely, both from a plot perspective and through the lens of Sarnoski, who leaves his fingerprints all over the franchise and imbues the prequel with a surprisingly poignant relationship between Nyong’o’s Sam and Joseph Quinn’s Eric, a young British student who moved to New York for law school. (If you’re a fan of Stranger Things, you’ll know Quinn as Eddie Munson, the D&D-playing metalhead and stand-out character from the show’s fourth season. He also had a brief appearance in the seventh season of Game of Thrones, and will appear in the upcoming sequel to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.)

Sam and Eric are strangers thrown together by circumstance and quickly grow close. Eric, overwhelmed by the world being turned upside down in a country he’s not yet accustomed to, needs someone to latch onto. Sam, who has isolated herself as she wastes away from cancer, finds the companionship she didn’t know she needed.

While tens of thousands of New Yorkers heed the US military’s call to head to South Street Seaport for evacuation via boats, as the Death Angels apparently cannot swim, Sam is determined to reach Patsy’s pizzeria in Harlem, where she believes the world’s last slice of their beloved thin-crust pizza awaits. Unlike the other survivors, she doesn’t have the possibility of a future if she makes it to safety.

Walking from Chinatown in lower Manhattan to Patsy’s in Harlem is a hike, about nine miles as the crow flies. It would take most people the better part of three hours to walk under normal circumstances. In an invasion, when the slightest sound can mean death, it’s an extraordinarily dangerous and long journey.

Still, being determined to get the very last slice of pizza in an apocalypse is precisely the sort of ridiculous thing I’d do, so I sympathize with Sam.

Day One — In an amusing scene early in the film, a man in a bodega tells Nyong’o’s Sam she can’t have a cat in the store — while his own shop cat lounges on the counter next to him. Bonus point for the Knicks hat. Credit: Paramount

As for Frodo, he’s one cute little dude! I appreciate the fact that Michael Sarnoski elected to have an adult cat rather than a kitten, not because I have anything against kittens, but because Frodo is a reminder that felines of all ages are beautiful, and there are plenty of Frodos in shelters.

Nico and Schnitzel, the cats who play Frodo, are great animal actors. In one scene Frodo sees Quinn emerge from a flooded subway and stops, curiosity playing across his little face. He looks at the stranger and his mouth opens ever so slightly, as if in shock. How many takes did Sarnoski need to get that?

Frodo is also a survivor. His hunting instincts kick in when he sees a rat, drawing him closer to danger, and at one point curiosity beckons him toward the ruined shell of a building where the Death Angels are apparently nesting.

Incredibly, he never meows. There are times when he freaks out and runs, as cats are known to do, but he reliably finds his way back to Sam, and he has a knack for remaining absolutely still and silent when he needs to be.

There were so many moments when I imagined myself in Sam’s shoes and Buddy in Frodo’s paws, and we’d have been dead in all of them. As I noted in my post about the “Quiet Place Challenge” trend on social media, the Budster and I would have a life expectancy of approximately 60 seconds in the film’s world. Death by Buddy would be my fate, as inescapable as his mealtime screeching.

There is also a visceral 9-11 feel to the opening sequences of the invasion, and any New Yorker old enough to remember that day will be reminded of it. It’s impossible not to with the scenes of ash-covered survivors huddled inside buildings, crowds of dead-eyed people walking away from disaster and the eerie sight of a sooty Manhattan bereft of its usual bustle and life.

There are of course plot holes in Day One, or at least unanswered questions to things that don’t seem to make sense. When the military’s helicopters sweep over Manhattan, announcing via loudspeakers that survivors should head to the ports because “the enemy cannot swim,” I wondered: did these aliens just land in Manhattan? If so, why? Surely they don’t recognize the arbitrary municipal boundaries of humanity, and the whole area is one seemingly endless metropolis.

The Death Angels are obviously sentient, but whether they’re sapient is another matter. They don’t seem to have much in the way of a sense of self-preservation, and there is no method to their madness. During the aforementioned helicopter scene, the characters watch as hundreds of Death Angels race toward lower Manhattan, drawn by the sound of the choppers and the loudspeaker. It’s impossible not to think it would be trivial to draw the lot of them with the loudest possible sound, then drop a few daisy cutters on them and call it a day.

Of course if any of that happened there would be no movie and no drama, so as with most stories like this, it’s best to let the film pull you along without stopping to over-analyze what you’re seeing.

If you’ve watched the first two films, you also know the reasons for the invasion are nebulous. The Death Angels don’t eat their kills, as Krasinski’s Lee Abbott learned, and if they’re the vanguard of a more intelligent species, doing all the dirty work before the masters arrive, well, we’ve yet to see who’s pulling the strings.

Overall, like horror master Mike Flanagan taking on a sequel to the tepid Ouiji earlier in his career, Sarnoski doesn’t view the fact that Day One is a prequel as an excuse to phone in a performance. He approaches the film with enthusiasm and energy as if it’s one of his own creations, and that’s evident in every frame. It’s a Sarnoski movie that happens to be a genre film, not the other way round.

There’s a surprising poignancy to Day One that makes it more than the sum of its parts. We’re not here to spoil anything, but if you’re a cat lover, we will say that Day One doesn’t pull an I Am Legend. You can watch the film with reassurance that Sarnoski has better tricks up his sleeve for stirring your emotions than gratuitous animal-involved violence.

It’s rare when a sequel or a prequel reaches the same heights as the original. How many of us wish franchises like Alien and The Matrix stopped at one film? Thankfully that’s not the case here. There’s life in A Quiet Place yet, and like the best science fiction, it’s a film that uses extraordinary circumstances to tell a very human story.

Perhaps the best part is the experience has made a cat lover of Nyong’o. In a short promo (below), she explains that she’s always been afraid of cats, viewing them as miniature lions.

“Now,” she says with a laugh, “somehow, I love them!”

She’s not just saying that either. After filming Day One, she adopted her own cat, Yoyo, and it takes just a glance at her Instagram page, which is festooned with photos of the orange tabby, to know that she really does love the little guy.

Geniuses Pull Wild Bear Cubs Off Tree To Take Selfies, Orphaning One

A group of people in North Carolina plucked two bear cubs off of a tree, dancing and laughing as they took selfies with the traumatized baby animals.

The World Wildlife Federation’s last Living Planet Report warned in 2022 that 69 percent of all wildlife has disappeared since 1970. A terrifying report from conservationists this year brought news that the natural world has fallen silent, with billions of animals erased from existence.

Why?

Because humans reproduce and rampage across the planet, no longer subject to survival of the fittest, with absolutely no regard for the species we share our world with.

That was proven again this week when a group of five people spotted bear cubs clinging to a tree not far from an apartment complex in Fairview, North Carolina, and decided the best course of action was to tear the terrified cubs off the branches so they could take selfies with them.

“So she can say, ‘Here, take my picture, post it all over. I’m holding a black bear,'” a horrified witness, 21-year-old Rachel Staudt, said as she filmed the group on Tuesday. “That’s insane. That’s 100% what she’s doing. She’s taking pictures of him.”

People taking selfies with bear cubs — A still from Staudt’s video shows members of the group holding the bear cubs.

The woman called the authorities, who responded with a biologist from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, but not before the damage was done.

“Did she just drop it?” the woman filming the group said as one of the group members did a “celebratory dance move,” dropped one of the cubs, then chased it to get it back and take more photos.

The group told police and the biologist that both bears had “escaped,” but the biologist found one of the traumatized cubs near a retention pond on the property.

“The cub appeared to be lethargic and frightened. It looked to be favoring one of its front paws and was wet and shivering,” Game Mammals and Surveys Supervisor Colleen Olfenbuttel told CBS News. “The cub’s condition is likely a result of the unnecessary and irresponsible actions of the people involved.”

That cub has now been orphaned, as authorities said it’s not in any condition to be returned to the wild and will have to be raised and rehabilitated for the next four to six years. The other cub couldn’t be found. Hopefully it escaped.

Bear cub — The orphaned and traumatized bear cub that was recovered Tuesday after a group of people plucked the cub and its sibling out of a tree to take selfies with them.

Authorities noted it’s not uncommon for mother bears to leave their cubs briefly to go foraging, much like mother cats do with kittens and cubs when they need to hunt to feed themselves.

Common sense and a basic respect for wildlife is usually enough to keep people from snatching the animals, but much like people who pay money to take selfish with tigers who have been sedated to their eyeballs, any concern for the welfare of animals — if it existed in the first place — is quickly shelved as people can’t resist the opportunity to grab a selfie in the age of narcissism-fueled social media.

Authorities say they’re conducting an investigation, although it’s not clear what needs to be investigated. The people involved documented their behavior with selfies, and Staudt’s video clearly shows them handling the confused and scared baby animals.

The kind of ignorance demonstrated by the group doesn’t remedy itself. Authorities should make an example of them by prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law while redoubling efforts to educate people about keeping their distance from wild animals. And if that’s not enough motivation, or if people can’t be bothered to respect wildlife, they should consider that this would be a very different story if the cubs’ mother had been nearby.

Top image courtesy of Pexels

Cats Are Fighting The Ukraine War On The Propaganda Front — And From The Trenches

From the military camps where they stop mice from wreaking havoc to social media where they help raise money, Ukraine’s felines are enduring the war alongside their people.

Roman Sinicyn and his men were living in an abandoned house in a destroyed village for a month.

Although each of the Ukrainian soldiers contributed to their survival and fought the Russians, perhaps their biggest hero was Syrsky the Cat.

The fearless feline evicted a rodent infestation in the platoon’s temporary headquarters, hunting the mice mercilessly as his humans engaged in firefights with invading Russians. By day Syrsky made the soldiers’ temporary lodgings livable and by night he soothed their trauma with healing purrs.

The cheese-loving moggie’s moniker is a double-entendre: he’s named for Ukrainian Army Land Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrsky, and for the Ukrainian word for cheese, syr.

A new story from Politico EU details the important role of felines as the costly war enters its third year. Russian missiles, bombs and artillery have flattened villages, sending civilians fleeing and often separating them from their families and their pets.

The bewildered cats and dogs, accustomed to easy lives indoors, are suddenly thrust into a world of death, explosions, mine fields and other horrors.

As the war endured past its early phases, former pets began seeking out humans where they could find them — in military camps and in the rodent-infested trenches where they hunkered down against the constant thunderclaps of Russian artillery.

During peak war season in the summer, Vladimir Putin’s bedraggled military fires up to 20,000 artillery rounds a day according to the Associated Press, with that number dipping to “only” 7,000 per day as the war machine slows in brutally cold Slavic winters.

shaybykcat — Oleksandr Liashuk, a Ukrainian soldier, with his cat Shaybyk. Credit: Oleksandr Liashuk

Just like they did 10,000 years ago when they first domesticated themselves, cats proved their worth by chasing out mice and rats, but this time they didn’t have to convince humans to allow them to stick around. They were welcomed with open arms and hands bearing snacks, serving as hunters and therapy animals to men enduring a living hell.

“When this scared little creature comes to you, seeking protection, how could you say no? We are strong, so we protect weaker beings, who got into the same awful circumstances as we did, just because Russians showed up on our land,” Oleksandr Yabchanka, a Ukrainian medic, told Politico.

It’s amazing how a return to primitive circumstances has so quickly pushed humans back toward reliance on animals who made it possible for our species to survive in the first place.

Without dogs, early hunter-gatherers would have been much worse off on the hunt and their groups would have been much more susceptible to ambush when they slept. Indigenous societies eking out existences on the tundra would have no reliable animals to pull sleds. Without oxen to pull plows, farmers wouldn’t be able to produce enough food for civilization to thrive and grow.

And the people of nascent human settlements, taking the first great leap forward for our species with the invention of agriculture, would have starved out over long winters as mice and rats gnawed away at their food stores — if not for cats, our furry friends.

In 2024 humans can’t live without cats once again. Felines patrol Ukraine’s World War I style bunkers, killing hordes of mice. Mice that otherwise devour MREs, chew through comm link and power wires, damage weapons and make soldiers miserable.

ukrainecat — A Ukrainian soldier with a stray kitten. Credit: Ukraine Ministry of Defense

Some cats become unofficial unit mascots and good luck charms, but many others are claimed by individual soldiers who find normalcy and relief in their company.

One soldier/cat pair are viral sensations thanks to videos of the alert cat riding along with his human, scanning the terrain ahead. Another story detailed a patrol whose men just avoided an ambush thanks to their company’s cat, who spotted the enemy first and frantically warned that something was wrong.

In that way, cats are serving the propaganda effort as well, helping the public to connect to the men and women defending them.

Military cats have become signals for Ukrainians to rally around, but Russians are doing it too. Russia is a famously cat-loving country, and Putin’s government has latched onto stories about the felines accompanying his men into battle — an effort that Politico notes is meant to humanize Russian soldiers and create the impression that it values them even as it continues to conscript unwilling civilians and ship them to the front line “meat grinders” with a few weeks’ worth of training, meager supplies and minimal ammunition for their rifles.

In that respect, the soldiers of Ukraine and Russia have at least two things in common — they love their feline companions, and they’re enduring hell as well as a high risk of death because of one small man’s delusions of greatness and legacy. Western media tends to ignore the humanity of Russian conscripts, and the pro-Ukrainian side of the internet calls them “orcs,” painting them as the mindless and disposable drones of a bloodthirsty dictator.

But they’re human too, with their own hopes and fears, and mothers back home worrying about them. They don’t want to be there. It seems fanciful to imagine Russians refusing to continue the invasion when Putin has squads behind the front lines with guns pointed at his own men to prevent them from deserting or refusing to fight. But maybe the men in the trenches can come together over shared interest and shared love of cats, and help put an end to three years of misery.