Truth be told, most of us figured we didn’t need another “origin story” take on The Day the Aliens Who Hear Dropped In on “A Quiet Place.” John Krasinski & Co. covered that in a small town urban and suburban setting in the franchise prequel “A Quiet Place: Part 2.”

But writer-director Michael Sarnoski pretty much acknowledges that in his entry on this franchise, “A Quiet Place: Day One.” Moving the horror and suspense of spidery, asteroid-transported aliens slaughtering everyone they hear (but cannot see) to New York is hardly a Big Idea. The film can seem perfunctory in the ways we don’t see people responding to the threat, learning, surviving and figuring out “they can’t swim” and the like.

The clever stroke to “Day One” is casting some of the most expressive actors in the biz in key roles, in creating a fatalism that lowers the stakes, sets up expectations and yet still delivers pathos.

The terror is as breathless as ever — suspense over the silence of a stifled-cough, the whispered-creaking of a suitcase on wheels, a squeaking wheelchair or a ripping shirt.

Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o dazzles as a jaded New Yorker whom we meet in a hospice, a Harlem poetess who has already drawn a death sentence and thus lives through Frodo, her pet who just happens to be the world’s quietest cat.

Nyong’o’s eyes capture the resignation of Sam’s fate and the fear of the unthinkable unknown, an invasion of alien predators who slaughter anything that makes a noise.

Djimon Hounsou, seen in “Part 2,” brings his blend of nobility and stoicism to the role of a father who meets Sam and others in her hospice at a marionette show “in the city,” a man who acts on instinct, makes a quick analysis of the threat and does his damnedest to keep everybody within reach safe until they can work out how to escape from a city cut off from the world thanks to precautionary Air Force strikes that knock down the bridges into Manhattan.

Alex Wolff nicely portrays the humanity of most everyone you ever meet who works with the dying in a hospice. Ruben is the one who promises Sam “a slice” “in the city,” a taste of real New York pizza, as a way to get her to join her fellow patients for that marionette show.

When all hell breaks loose and Sam is thrown together with British lawyer Eric (Joseph Quinn of “Stranger Things”), the importance of that “last slice” as “the world is ending” rises in her priorities, while Eric is clinging to the tough, cynical New Yorker as if he knows “survival” is a badge of honor among those who live in the Five Boroughs.

There isn’t much Sarnoski, who gave us the Nic Cage thriller-delight “Pig,” can show us that’s new — those who survive the initial onslaught, children included, realizing that they can talk during rainstorms or under the showering noise of fountains. So he sets out to give us vivid, under-explained characters hurled into a thin, nightmarish story, learning on the fly (seemingly) as they take what none of them can hope is their hero’s journey.

Nyong’o, Hounsou, Quinn and Wolff win our pity, our empathy and our respect as these New Yorkers face their fates at the beginning of a global nightmare which no one can see through, see past or realistically expect to survive. They make “Day One” both engrossing, and a great argument for why this “franchise” has said what it has to say and thus is ready to take its final bow.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Sarnoski, based on characters created by Bryan Wood and Scott Beck. A Paramount Pictures release.

Running time: 1:40