Starring Sonya Walger, Hayley Erin, Tony Amendola, Jeb Berrier, Ayanna Berkshire, Betty Moyer, Blaine Palmer, Kevin-Michael Moore, Lisa Cross, Nick George, Colton Ruscheinsky, La Johnson, Tim Blough and Jeffrey Arrington

Written and directed by John Rosman

On digital platforms now

Jessica (Hayley Erin) is on the run from a murder. Elsa (Sonya Walger) is on the run from ALS. When she’s sent to bring Jessica in, the two women’s live intertwine around each other as something awful begins to spread.

This is a debut feature and an astonishingly good one. Writer and director John Rosman’s small cast and cinematographer Mark Evans’ big countryside throw the massive ideas at the heart of the story into two levels of focus and give the movie a sense of expansiveness that the budget never could. It’s a clear evolution of the Covid cinema we’ve seen expressed in everything from Blackbird to the way Awake was staged and here it’s used to both emphasize the isolation and the stakes. This feels like our world: terrified, barely over what happened, ill prepared for the next outbreak.

If that sounds grim, it is and it’s intentional. Rosman’s two leading ladies turn in career best work as the script explores the nature of their places in the world. Jessica moves from place to place, hiding inside the good will of a pair of farmers (Moyer and Palmer) and a bar manager (Berkshire). The supporting cast are all superb and all feel like people whose lives have briefly interacted with hers rather than window dressing. That makes what follows all the more chilling as Jessica slowly realises what she’s carrying. and what it does. In a clever move, Rosman has her, and Walger’s Sonya, put it together almost at the same time and it lands with a very similar tone to superb Adam Wingard movie The Guest. Both are concerned with the collision between society and the ethics-free vacuum of big business and both focus on the fragility of the people caught in the way. This, if anything, works better, with the two leads finding something other than a weapon in the central premise. Erin’s haunted, frantic Jessica becomes the living embodiment of a carrier, desperate to keep living but wrapped in the ambiguity of whether that’s her or the virus talking.

Meanwhile Walger’s Elsa is a fixer fully capable of getting her hands bloody but suffering from ALS. The way she struggles to balance her life and her condition mirrors Jessica’s own and leads to an ending which again puts this movie side by side with The Guest. Both are fascinated by what happens when a weapon realizes it has no agency and both find new, complex answers to that question. Walger’s final scene here is a demonstration of why she’s so good. A dozen emotions in one micro expression and the tiniest hint of a very surprising kind of vengeance. An understandable one too. I’ll leave whether or not it’s excusable up to you.

The one bum note here is one I’m loathe to spoil. There’s a horror movie trope which doesn’t feel especially necessary and takes some of the edge off. That’s personal preference though.

Verdict: Even with that, this is a fiercely clever, inventive movie that marks Rosman and Erin as talents to watch and confirms once again just how impressive Walger is. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

New Life releases digitally on June 3rd