It could be the idea of setting the Quiet Place prequel in New York, one of the noisiest places on Earth. Or perhaps it’s because the intimate, taut horror premise of the first two pictures is beefed up with some robust city-smashing disaster movie muscle. Maybe it’s the casting of the always excellent Lupita Nyong’o in a textured and complex role – she plays Sam, a poet and a terminal cancer patient who just wants to live a little before she dies. All of this combines to ramp up the impact of A Quiet Place: Day One considerably, compared with its immediate predecessor. It’s a bleak, bruising but also curiously life-affirming account of the start of the end of the world. The directing baton has been passed to Michael Sarnoski (Pig), who co-wrote the film’s deft, light-footed screenplay with the original writer/director, John Krasinski. And while there are a couple of underdeveloped plot points (the discovery of an alien egg nursery is rather thrown away) and an over-reliance on Sam’s unfeasibly unflappable cat as a device, for the most part, this is a stylish and satisfying prequel that elegantly integrates Sam’s poet’s sensibility into the storytelling.

• In UK and Irish cinemas now