How The City Sings

On Gutting The Arts, Jim From The Office, and A Quiet Place Day One

This is part of a series of essays about my favourite horror sequels. Read the introduction here, and the full archive here. Subscribe for free to have it delivered to your inbox every other day in October. If you're enjoying it, you can show your appreciation by buying me a coffee or sharing it with friends.

Spoilers: I try my best not to spoil the films I discuss, but if spoilers ruin your viewing experience, it might be safer to watch the films before reading.

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) Dir. Michael Sarnoski

Plot Summary: Samira tries to get herself a slice of pizza amid an alien invasion.

"This place is shit.
This place smells like shit.
Betsy's voice sounds like shit.
Cancer is shit.
Oscar does that stupid walk when he wants to hide he shit his pants.
And Milton has shit taste in music." - Samira (from her unfinished poem)

Purpose Built Student Accommodation is booming here in the UK, and especially in Scotland. While rents are skyrocketing and affordable housing stock isn't being built to meet demand, the biggest priority for developers appears to be extortionately priced, luxury, gated communities for students. PBSAs are considered safe investment opportunities for private equity. Their lobbyists have been successful in securing exemptions from housing regulations and tenant protections - which ultimately means that should the student population diminish, these properties would be unfit for anyone else to live in. Because apparently, students aren't real people and don't deserve the same housing protections as everyone else.

PBSAs are exempt from rent controls and often have rent increases written into their contracts. The average rent of a PBSA is 70% of the highest available student loans making them largely unaffordable to most students. International students are particularly at risk since they have no UK guarantors and are obligated to pay for 6-11 months of rent upfront. The buildings use valuable land to generate profit for private companies rather than provide affordable housing or public space for the local community.

I promise this is about A Quiet Place: Day One.

Summerhall is an arts and festival space here in Edinburgh. It was once a veterinary college, with the sort of Edwardian Lecture Theatres that you see in films like Poor Thing and Frankenstein. It's a category B listed building. It's where I go life drawing and where I've seen many a Fringe show or gig. It's also home to over 100 artists, creatives and small businesses.

This month, the recent new owners of the space, AMA Homes, have announced they're going to partially demolish Summerhall to make way for PBSAs, hotels and other private companies to move in.

This news comes on the back of the announcement that St. Margaret's House, home for 18 years, to over 200 artists and community organisers in Edinburgh, is being sold off. Current tenants have been told to evict the premises by January 2027. The rumour/fear is that the new owners are planning to turn the building into another PBSA.

Honestly, I will start talking about A Quiet Place.

Relatedly, tutors at the University of Edinburgh are in their third week of a five week strike against cuts totalling £140 million. The cuts will see the closure of 90 courses (the majority of which are arts and humanities courses), and the loss of 1,800 jobs. The cuts were announced by Principal and Vice Chancellor Peter Mathieson (who has a salary of £400k and a second job) while the university enjoys a surplus of £104 million. Last week, amid the strikes, Mathieson announced his resignation though his planned cuts and refusal to negotiate with the UCU appears to remain in place.

These cuts to the arts are not just limited to Edinburgh. Juliet Jacques at Novara notes the gutting of the arts and humanities in education is happening nationwide and is part of a wider trend of undervaluing art and culture. Current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has proposed paying for the building of more prisons by cutting £1 billion from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport.

Creative agencies like the Society of Authors and the Association of Illustrators have just signed a new Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries. When the technology built to replace us has been trained on stolen art and is contributing to the climate catastrophe this feels like an oxymoron and a capitulation when art deserves (needs) stronger, more forceful protection.

Art is under attack. Not just here in Edinburgh. Not just in the UK. And not just the artists, or the places that educate those artists - the public spaces that allow people to access art are being taken away too.

Additionally, even the defenders of art try to make the case that art is financially profitable. I understand where the reasoning for that defence comes from - and it is true - but it's also self-defeating. The point, the usefulness, and the societal function of art is not that it needs to be profitable. Though of course, that helps. No, it is about how empty our lives would be without it. How it gives us about ourselves, how it teaches us to see other perspectives, how it provides joy, or wisdom, or catharsis.

How it helps us communicate with each other.

I recently wrote about my love and admiration for 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. In that piece, I talked about how our governments and societies prioritise military spending, arms and violence, over art, culture, and care. A fearful, individualistic worldview that is often reflected in post-apocalyptic cinema.

I wish I'd mentioned A Quiet Place: Day One in that piece.

The Quiet Place series started as a script by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods which eventually crossed the desk of Jim From The Office who was in the process of trying to make people forget he was Jim From The Office. Part of that process was to bulk up and do a bit of light CIA propaganda in Jack Ryan, the other was to direct, co-write and star in A Quiet Place. He proceeded to spend the majority of the press tour for the film talking about how he hated horror films, but don't worry - he made a good one. As you can imagine, this did not endear me towards Jim From The Office.

If A Quiet Place is about "what if Jim From The Office was a really awesome, competent dad?", A Quiet Place: Part Two bravely asked the question: "what if Cillian Murphy wasn't quite as good a dad as Jim From The Office?"

But despite my ladles of snark here, even I have to admit the conceit of indestructible aliens that hunt by sound is an excellent delivery mechanism for tense set-pieces. The structural architecture around those set-pieces are full of absurd plot/character contrivances, but it is hard to dispute their power in a packed cinema where you can feel everyone holding their breath.

I also need to hand it to Jim From The Office for giving us the silliest bit of environmental storytelling to ever grace a cinema.

For all their faults, the Quiet Place films are solid, watchable creature features. So I sat down to watch Day One with the expectation of more of the same. Instead, I got something so much more thoughtful, interesting and beautiful from Pig director, Michael Sarnoski.

On the face of it, Day One is set up to be your typical, big budget, franchise entry. Moving from the fairly contained world of a family surviving on a farm, to the middle of New York City during the first day or two of the alien invasion. But Sarnoski wisely makes the stakes as small, and seemingly inconsequential as possible.

We follow Samira (Sam), a poet and terminally ill cancer patient. She is understandably bitter, prickly, and evidently just waiting for death. It is only in her service cat, Frodo, that we see the kindness that Sam refuses to offer anyone around her. She has closed herself off from the world. Not dead, but not quite living. When the aliens hit NYC, Sam appears to wake up to the world. But rather than seek survival, something that she knows will only be temporary for her anyway, she decides to live for something: A slice of pizza from Patsy's.

"You're a poet?" - Eric

"Not anymore." - Samira

On her journey, Sam and Frodo (yep) pick up a stray: Eric. A terrified British law student from Kent who, like a lost puppy, refuses to stop following her. Eric suffers from panic attacks and more generally appears to be at a complete loss without someone telling him what to do. We get the sense, later in the film, that he might have pursued a creative career if he hadn't been told to go into law.

"This wasn't part of the plan." - Eric

Both Sam and Eric have small internal character arcs that leave them in better places at the end of the film but, crucially, don't have them changing the course of humanity or figuring out a way to beat the aliens. No whiteboards exclaiming "WHAT IS THE WEAKNESS?" here. The scale is tiny but relatable: pizza, inner confidence, learning to like people - and life - again. Also, keep the cat alive.

It works especially well with Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn - both excellent in this - as the two leads. Quinn also plays a version of masculinity you rarely see in films like this: vulnerable, unafraid to cry, incompetent, prone to panic attacks, and scared. This makes his acts of bravery so much more impactful.

Eric is introduced to us in this lovely, quiet scene transition that is indicative of the kind of choices Sarnoski makes in Day One. Frodo has run away from Sam in the middle of some alien carnage and we rejoin him, alone, chasing a mouse. The mouse evades his clutches and he instead stops to gently lap at a flooded subway entrance. This quiet scene is interrupted by Eric, emerging from the water, no doubt narrowly escaping his own near-death experience. Frodo and Eric stare at each other for a beat. It's a very atypical way to introduce one of your characters in a mainstream blockbuster like this. But Day One is full of these moments. Small, still, serene.

Sarnoski also smartly pinpoints a key theme of A Quiet Place - the inability to communicate with speech - and folds that into a contemplative film about what we're living for. Because art is all about communication. About trying to communicate something to another human that you couldn't do any other way. And hopefully, by doing so, contributing something worthwhile to that person's life. It's a film that, I think, stands in contrast to the first two films, and to things like Final Destination - wherein the act of surviving just one more day takes precedence over what that life actually looks like.

When Sam wants Eric to truly understand her, she asks him to read her poem:

"Bad Math.
You said one to two years, and it has been two.
You said four to sixth months, and it has been six.
And Mrs. Friedlander taught me subtraction,
and the corner store taught me addition,
and I used only simple maths all my life.
And I never needed more than more,
and less. To four. To three.
To smaller and smaller.
Until months,
to days,
to hours,
to seconds.
But to not now." - Eric (reading from Samira's poem Bad Math)

While there's a very exciting sprint to get to a boat that concludes the film, the true conclusion, for me, is the sequence just before, in Harlem. As Eric and Sam share a slice of pizza and a drink in the bar where Sam's father played piano once upon a time. Eric, recognising the importance of the moment, performs a magic show for Sam - a piece of silent entertainment for his friend. Live theatre. Art.

To communicate without speaking. Not for profit, not out of fear, but out of love.

"Thank you for bringing me home. Thank you for helping me live again. I had forgotten how the city sings. You can hear it when you're quiet. It's good to have been back." - Samira

Exhumed Contents

• Join Living Rent's campaign to stop PBSAs in Edinburgh.
• Donate to the hardship fund for striking teachers or join the picket lines.
• You can view, and object to, the Summerhall proposals by taking part in the consultation here.
• Stewart Lee on the importance of art that doesn't have to justify itself financially.
• If you'd like to support some local artists and you live in Edinburgh, TAGS Festival is this Saturday (17th Oct). I'll be tabling there with my comics, zines and prints. So will a lot of excellent comic artists and illustrators. Come say hello!

• If you liked this post, I'll have copies of my Art at the End of the World zine on my table. It features a revised version of my essay about 28 Years Later and art in post-apocalyptic media.
• I'll also be exhibiting at Edinburgh Zine Fair in November (7th and 8th) which will be at St. Margaret's House for the last time. Come say goodbye to the space before it's all luxury housing.
• I wrote about PBSAs, ghost malls, hostile architecture and how this all ties in to the popularity of liminal horror for a piece in the third issue of Skrawl Magazine. That issue will available to buy at Thought Bubble in November.

• Michael Sarnoski had been reading The Five Invitations - a book about what people nearing death discovered about living that we could all learn from - when he was asked to pitch his idea for a Quiet Place prequel.
• A great interview with Michael Sarnoski on Script Apart about writing the screenplay. I always think it's a good sign when a director says "we" a lot, instead of "I".
• The casting of the two cats - Nico and Schnitzel - who play Frodo. Plus other behind-the-scenes stuff.
• It is very funny to me that most of the Letterboxd reviews for this are either some version of: a) I would have burned the cinema to the ground if the cat died, or b) I would have died within 5 seconds if that was my cat. I agree with both reviews.
• Somehow, Some More News have more antipathy for Jim From The Office than I do.
• If you're in Edinburgh, there's a Leith Kino screening tonight of Don't Look Now - one of the greatest horror films ever made - at Argonaut Books. Tickets are here.
• Argonaut's Halloween programme is excellent if you're looking for more horror-related events in Edinburgh this month.
• This was film number 8! We're halfway through the month. I hope you're enjoying it so far. If so, please share it around. I am slightly hitting a wall already so could use a bit of a boost!