The original A Quiet Place was fine enough but to some extent it was a premise in search of a story – after seeing what seemed like at least three other horror movies based on monsters that attack according to one of the five senses around the same time, I enjoyed it enough while it was on but not enough to seek the sequel out.

Watching this movie reminded me a little bit of Cloverfield, another horror breakout they've tried to make into a cinematic universe ever since. I'm not sure how financially successful the subsequent films in either franchise were, but John Krasinski's effort and the sequel a few years later obviously made enough to convince the studio an origin story on a bigger canvas would be worth the investment.

Krasinski wrote the story of this film but not the script, and nor does he direct. It takes a trope from the rest of the series where title cards identify how far into the alien invasion we are by giving this film the subtitle, Day One – this is where it all begins.

When the creatures evidently fall from the sky all over the world, we could watch the fallout anywhere and to anyone, so it zeroes in on palliative cancer patient Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), a cynic living in a rest home/hospice not far from New York with little to look forward to except the regular trips to the city where she can get a slice of pizza from her favourite Harlem restaurant.

She takes her beloved support cat, bundles into the bus with her kindly, patient carer and some other residents, and it's when she leaves a puppet show they're all watching in a Manhattan theatre to wander around outside that the skies open up and chaos descends. If you watched either of the first two films and wanted to see what the arrival of the death angels would look like in a big city, A Quiet Place: Day One answers your prayers.

Samira runs from one disaster zone to the other, all the while hearing military helicopters overhead telling people to evacuate Manhattan from the port downtown. She teams up with visiting British law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) and they go from the subway to the high rises to the deserted streets, trying to stay out of the monsters' way, trying not to make a sound and trying to stay alive.

The story is an effective timeline of cause, effect and happenstance and manages to elbow in a little bit of character development thanks to Samira wanting to reconnect with the spirit of her jazz musician father thanks to the bar he used to play in. It never seemed to be the USP of this franchise to have the scariest films in the world, so while there are some effectively tense scenes it won't give you nightmares. Instead, it has everything you could want from a horror thriller in the right place and at the right velocity.