To our local cinema, then, last weekend, to see ‘A Quiet Place, Day One.’ The Dominion would be a decent enough place to stay schtum and wait out the aliens in this film, incidentally: it’s a very douce movie house, in Edinburgh’s leafy Morningside, genteelly rocking its art deco origins. I’m quite sure if it all went down with the Big-Luggedy Ones the lovely staff would ever so politely usher you all down to the cinema on the lower floor, and continue to serve you wine and Pringles whilst showing a season of Buster Keaton films until the coast was clear.

Our understanding of the plot wasn’t really hampered by this being the prequel to two other films in the franchise we hadn’t seen yet. That was probably because the plot isn’t exactly rocket science: woman dying from cancer with support cat is on a day out to New York on the very day a race of aliens who like the taste of us and hunt by sound pitch up. The woman, knowing she’s circling the drain due to said Big C, chooses not to flee to the rescue point (the aliens, conveniently for us, can’t swim) but heads to her home turf of Harlem for one last slice of her favourite pizza. Along the way she picks up a random bloke who she (spoiler alert) helps get to safety.

Put as baldly as that, it doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, really. However, the franchise’s genius is the need for the protagonists to stay quiet, which means parts of the film are also very quiet, right up until someone sneezes or farts and the big scary aliens come down and bite their head off (okay, so nobody got discovered by farting out loud, but they will in my rewrite, and you get the idea). So it’s an action movie which doesn’t just go bang Bang BANG!!! all the time. This makes the jump scares, when they happen, all the more effective.

So really, if you’re looking for a horror that makes you jump and uses a great concept pretty well, I’d recommend it. The rest of this is just me being picky and snarky for hoped for comic effect, so don’t feel you need to read on unless you want to.

Still here? So, then. Movie storytelling 101 is that your hero in a quest movie like this (the quest here being the Holy Grail of pizza, which is so good even the support cat eats it) has to undergo a personal journey, and be changed by the end of the movie. In this it’s fairly successful: at the start, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is in a hospice, pissed off (as you would be) with its happy-clappy nurse Reuben and his therapy group. She’s in pain and dying and crabby and difficult, and writes poems about everything in the hospice being shite. By the end, she’s just about come to terms with her dying and everything, her difficult relationship with her Dad, and, I’m taking a wild guess here, underwhelming sales of her latest poetry collection. That bit’s okay.

What I don’t get is why the annoying nurse, Reuben, gets his head bitten off in the first refuge they find themselves in, and she then picks up Eric, the random English law student. I don’t get two things about it: Reuben seems like basically a nice guy, if a bit happy-clappy, and he and Sam have obviously got this pre-existing spiky relationship going on. He could have also been on a journey the entire film, from annoying happy-clappy guy to someone worth setting several car alarms off for so he can swim the Hudson with your cat to safety (oh, I forgot: spoiler alert).

The second thing I don’t get is why Eric doesn’t just head off with the crowds. There seems to be no hint of romantic interest between him and Sam. Maybe he likes cats. Maybe, I suppose, he’s such a fan of that most abused example of Italian culinary art that he thinks a slice of pizza in Harlem is worth potentially getting his head bitten off for. If so, that’s not clearly explained. I suspect the reason is to do with him being Someone in the subsequent movies.

If I were being unduly picky, and I’m sure as hell going to be, other plot points are a bit squishy. Everyone seems to understand right away that the aliens are guided by sound rather than sight. That seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. Maybe they’d travelled forward in time and seen the rest of the franchise. Also, come on. A cat that stays quiet when it’s supposed to? We’ll come back to the cat presently, however.

Meantime, another thing that could’ve been done better to my mind is the aliens themselves: maybe the CGI budget ran a bit short but, other than the distant shots where they look like big scary spiders climbing skyscrapers, you don’t actually see what they look like. A big bony (or is it metal) foot stamping past where the heroes are hidden. Jaws opening and slavering near a tasty bit of human tartare: but even then, it’s so dark you sometimes think they’re like the aliens in, well, Alien, with nested jaws within jaws, and at other times there seems to be some sort of fruiting body bulging out. What even is that, you wonder, as the cat waves its paw at Eric to indicate the nearest escape route.

Which leads us, inevitably, to the real star of the show, and it’s the cat, of course (although shout out to Lupita Nyong’o who was apparently feline-phobic when filming started). Actually, there were two cat actors, plus a fluffy toy for the stunts: presumably some namby-pamby thought it wasn’t a great idea to have an actual cat dragged through a flooded subway tunnel with its human colleagues). How does the cat outshine the rest of the cast? Well, simply by being a cat, naturally. I particularly like the way it just buggers off at various points, presumably to do whatever mysterious things cats do when humans aren’t watching them.

Maybe it, too, was pissed off at Reuben the happy-clappy nurse, and went and had a word with the aliens. You never quite know with cats.