Amid the dumper-truck of post-Covid lockdown-inspired films, very few take disease and pandemics themselves as their central focus (maybe after rewatching Contagion, we were all too eager to forget). So John Rosman’s stripped-back but effective debut is a sobering flashback to those incubative early days, its title punning its title punning on the microbe that asymptomatic protagonist Jessica (Hayley Erin) is carrying on her person, as well as her hopes for a fresh start, unharassed by government spooks, north of the Canadian border.
All we know at the start is that blood-splattered Jessica has just escaped imprisonment in some black-site facility. She bundles herself into a pickup heading north, which luckily belongs to kindly farmer Frank (Blaine Palmer), who sends her on her way with a new jacket and a rucksack full of tinned food. Rosman makes gradual sense of this chaotic getaway by drip-feeding us the recent past: how a cute collie pitched up at Jessica and her boyfriend’s campsite, then shortly afterwards the latter broke out into terrifying boils and welts.
Hardened private contractor Elsa (Sonya Walger) is hired to contain the outbreak on the down-low, even though she is given a cover story (that it is a form of Ebola). But she has been chosen because her own ticking clock – a diagnosis of motor neurone disease – means she is willing to put herself in harm’s way. As Jessica leaves a trail of infections in her wake, the double sentence for both fugitive and hunter adds a pervasive, almost introspective air of perishability to New Life; a communal sense of a future denied.
New Life makes the most of Jessica’s fraught interactions on the road, with spasmodic bursts of bubo-popping horror. The low-budget limitations start to show, though, in the implausibility of this impending global catastrophe hanging solely on the relationship between two people (with no sign of the huge pathology teams that would presumably be deployed). Rosman pads out this under-development with superfluous formal flourishes – like the film’s dialogue being intermittently marked up transcript-style, as in the recent film Reality. The moody twilight lensing and Erin’s poignantly anguished performance are all the film needs.
• New Life is available on digital platforms from 3 June.
