Something strange is happening at multiplexes this year. No, not the total cratering of an industry’s primary revenue stream—Inside Out 2 solved all that! Instead, the curious thing is that the prequels… are good. First there was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, an origin story for the brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road that may not live up to its predecessor’s dizzying highs, but is still better than most other blockbusters in recent years. And now there is A Quiet Place: Day One, a wholly unnecessary prequel to the sturdy Quiet Place duology that quite effectively justifies its existence.

As Day One’s title suggests, the film brings us back to the beginning of things, set in the time just before Earth was invaded by a scourge of monsters who navigate and hunt by sound—casting their human prey into a life of tensely managed silence. The world is loud at the start of Michael Sarnoski’s film, but is already ending. At least for one person, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), who is living her final days in hospice care, sullen and snippy and angry about her lot in life. How does an already doomed person confront the apocalypse?

That intriguing question sets the somber, interior tone of the film, which soon breaks out into terror and city-destroying violence without losing its sorrowful intimacy. Sam has found herself in New York City, credibly played by London and various British soundstage sets. The original Quiet Place films largely took place out in the country, and it is a compelling expansion of the series’s mythology to see how this might all have gone in a densely packed urban area. Not well, it turns out. Sarnoski all too credibly creates images of a mid-disaster Manhattan, ashen and haunted and tingling with danger, while largely avoiding any direct evocation of September 11.

The scale of what’s happened is largely suggested in the background, a sharp and economical strategy: implication is often far more frightening than seeing everything plainly laid out. Day One keeps its gaze close on two people—Sam picks up a lonely traveler, British expat Eric (Joseph Quinn), who refuses to leave her side—as they traverse a ruined vastness, frightened and forlorn. The score, by Alexis Grapsas, lilts and swells around them, adding further emotional dimension to an already disarmingly contemplative film.

Perhaps we should have expected this from Sarnoski, whose last film was the downbeat, psychologically probing revenge picture Pig, starring a morose Nicolas Cage. Sarnoski seems to be good at subverting genre expectations—where one expects blood and fury, he instead offers pathos.

Appreciated as that is, it means that Day One is not exactly the thrill ride some might be expecting. There are the requisite suspenseful scenes in which Sam and Eric try to keep quiet as they skirt by monsters, but the movie is perhaps missing one extra set piece. And this world is also frustratingly loose with its rules; in some scenes, the tiniest of noises sets the aliens running, while in others lots of clunks and shuffling of feet and even talking don’t seem to perk up the creatures’ gaping ear-mouths. To be fair, sometimes that difference is accounted for, particularly in the clever way that rain and thunder provides some sonic freedom for those struggling to mute themselves.

Nyong’o is especially adept at showing the strain of being quiet, all while Sam suffers from ever-mounting internal pain and yearns for one last connection to the life she once had. This is a quest movie of a sort, but the goal is simple: Sam only wants to get a slice of pizza from a cherished childhood spot in Harlem, after which, we are to assume, she will let go and slip away. What a small and sad little mission, one that, yes, does require characters to say “pizza” a few too many times, but is otherwise a fascinatingly micro-scale motivation for a franchise entry. Eric, as best as he can, helps Sam on her way, and she on his. No romance burbles up between them, only the camaraderie of people navigating a scary time when nearly all seems lost.

Corny and trite as it may sound, seeing that empty New York and the nervous people timidly scurrying around in it did conjure up memories of the darkest days of 2020, when half a city hid indoors and the other half went about the grave work of tending to the catastrophe. I’ve no idea if that was Sarnoski’s intent, but the similarities register nonetheless. How refreshingly nice it is to watch a summertime movie that lets us sit in our feelings and grim recollections this way, and figures that an adventure in its own right.