In A Quiet Place: Day One, Lupita Nyong’o’s Samira is an ISFP 4w5 who faces the apocalypse very differently from everyone around her. While New York descends into chaos, Samira remains focused on one intensely personal goal: reaching Harlem for pizza, a seemingly simple desire connected to memories of her father, home, and the life she is already preparing to leave behind.
ISFP 4w5 Characters
Why is Samira from A Quiet Place: Day One an ISFP 4w5? Continue reading for my argument using cognitive functions! The headers for each section are clickable, so you can easily access more information about the dominant function and the Enneagram type, or discover more characters who share the type.
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Introverted Feeling
ISFPs believe in being frank about their emotional experience, and in doing what feels right for them, even if others do not go along with them. And that shows up repeatedly in Samira’s behaviors:
The opening shot of the movie has Samira reading some of her poetry aloud to her cancer sufferers’ support group at the hospital. She includes mean remarks about the people sitting next to her because it accurately reflects her feelings toward them and for their situation (“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.”).
She insists on going to Harlem for pizza despite the evacuation, because she knows she is terminally ill, so survival is not meaningful for her (thus, her decision at the end of the film to be eaten by the aliens instead of to survive; but she saves her cat and Eric’s life, because she chooses to care about them, and her care comes from personal attachment). She just decides on the one last thing she wants (pizza, and to return to the neighborhood connected to her father); it makes sense to her, but to nobody else.
Samira initially resists Eric attaching himself to her, because she is self-contained and does not want to feel responsible for him. Once she allows him to be with her, she connects to him in quiet, meaningful ways, and does not allow his (or society’s) assumptions about how life “should” go to influence any of her decisions; she decides what her ending will look like.
Extraverted Sensing
ISFPs want to act on what they feel or believe to be personally meaningful, and Samira builds her entire arc around one thing:
She wants pizza. In Harlem. A sensory experience, immersed in the area in which she grew up, near where her father played piano before he died. She wants all the familiar sights and sounds, even as chaos erupts in the world around her: the smell, taste, location, streets, memories, and sensory experiences matter to her, even before she chooses to go with the group into New York City in the first place. (She says no to the invitation until the counselor agrees they can stop for pizza on the way home.)
Her sensory awareness is intense, and defines a lot of her decisions; she rapidly accepts what is happening, immediately notices that she can make sound next to fountains and beneath the rain, and helps Eric break down her door by telling him when to kick it in with the thunderclaps. It’s even important to her to scream beneath the sound of the storm and get out all her rage, both about the situation she is now in and about her frustration about dying from cancer. She observes what is happening and responds to it, even just to make the sound of a cat food tin popping open quieter.
In Harlem, Samira wants to be immersed in her environment. She physically returns to a place that is important to her, and that connects her with her dead father, and starts touching things; sitting at the piano, resting her hands on the keys, plugging in her Walkman to download music, etc. At the end, she plays music as she strolls down her old street, and lets death come for her to the tune of loud music.
Introverted Intuition
The intuition of an ISFP is mostly about personal symbolic interpretations and instinctual thinking, but under stress, can turn into tunnel vision, and “I want this exact thing.”
That’s what happens with Samira. She starts out only agreeing to the bus ride if they can eat pizza in Harlem (nowhere else), and once the city is under attack, she is annoyed that the evening she envisioned is not going to happen, so she leaves the group to go get pizza… in Harlem. Even after she finds Eric, and cares about his welfare, she still won’t turn around, go back, or reconsider because this is what she wants in her last few hours on earth. No substitutes. Part of her determination is because the pizza becomes symbolic and carries personal meaning; it’s about saying goodbye to her life and ending it on her own terms.
Several times, she connects to something deeply; she is initially skeptical about the puppet show, but then it touches her and she cries because it’s about life being out of control, and that’s how she feels. Later, she sees Eric has a future and can take care of her cat, Frodo, so she helps them escape. She has a fatalistic acceptance of her impending end, rather than imaginative thinking; she knows she is terminal.
Extraverted Thinking
ISFPs use extraverted thinking to follow through on their plans, but will not prioritize logic over their feelings.
The government has a straightforward proposition: to evacuate by following these instructions and getting to extraction points. Samira goes in the opposite direction, rejecting their logical desire to save her, and going further into danger on an emotional quest. She also rejects the likely reality of her goal (that if monsters have decimated Harlem, there will be no pizza to find, and no way to cook any more).
Her interactions with Eric often devolve into direct commands (go away, I don’t want to be responsible for you), which erupt when she’s annoyed or under stress. Once she has decided what she wants to do, she is pragmatic about getting it. Samira finds out what she has to do to survive long enough to get what she wants, and does it (outsmarting the monsters, going home, helping Eric find medicine, distracting the monsters from Eric and Frodo by setting off car alarms, etc.).
The Enneagram 4
4s believe they suffer greatly, are somewhat self-absorbed in that suffering, and also believe in the raw expression of how they feel, regardless of the circumstances.
Samira shows this in her poem. She is blunt about what she hates about her life, her diagnosis, and the people around her. She refuses to go along with them or to be sociable. When she first meets Eric, she tells him to stop following her. When everyone else heads for safety, she goes in the opposite direction, deeper into the city. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing; Samira knows what she wants and is going to get it. While in a great deal of pain, she rarely calls attention to it, believing it is her burden to bear. She also has a lot of rage about her prognosis and the fact that she is going to die, but decides to make her final hours something “beautiful” and meaningful to herself; she wants to draw deep meaning from these final hours on earth, and that means going to a place she loves, full of memories of her father, and immersing herself in it, before she ends it all on her own terms.
The 5 Wing
5s do not want anyone or anything dependent on them, because that takes up their precious time and attention. They also choose to follow their own logic, which can be fantastical, rather than to listen to other people.
This is Samira in a nutshell. She doesn’t want friends, she pushes people away, and she tries to get Eric to leave her alone, until she takes pity on him and lets him tag along to “get pizza.” She cares about her cat, because he demands very little of her. Samira also rejects what everyone else tells her, that she’s being irrational, that she needs to make her way to an extraction point, that it’s not a good time for pizza, and continues onward anyway, because she does not have any interest in listening to others. Her self-trust is absolute.
