Stream It Or Skip It?

New Life (now streaming on Hulu) is a crisply paced indie viral-outbreak thriller that dips its real-life dramatic horrors in the gooey guts of fantasy horror. First-time filmmaker John Rosman writes and directs this suspenseful parallel-narratives pursuer/pursued story, starring TV vets Hayley Erin (soap operas General Hospital and The Young and the Restless) and Sonya Walger (who you might recognize from Lost, For All Mankind and many other series) as, respectively, an unwittingly infected carrier of a nasty disease, and the contractor hired to track her down. Honest take? You could drive its many budgetary limitations right through a couple of big plot holes, but a solid visual and narrative foundation might make it worth a watch. Let’s explore further.

NEW LIFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Smart move, opening with a striking image (but not the film’s most striking): Jessica Murdock (Erin) wide-eyed and terrified, in a big hurry to get away from wherever she’s been. Oh, and she has blood all over her, but from the way she carries herself, it doesn’t seem like her own. She makes her way home and has just enough time to wash up and grab the little bit of cash in the house before men with guns show up and force her to flee out the window. She hides in the bed of a man’s truck and stows away in whatever direction he’s heading. At a rest stop, she hops out, cuts through the woods and finds an old barn near an isolated house. She curls up in the loft and surely fitful sleep follows.

Elsewhere. We meet Elsa Gray (Walger) as she stares at herself in a mirror lined with motivational quotes on sticky notes. In one hand, a pill sorter. In the other, a pistol. Whatever darkness she was contemplating is interrupted by Raymond Reed (Tony Amendola), who shows up unexpectedly, first commenting on the sparseness of her home – styled in true Hired Killer Chic – then recruiting her for a job. He wants her to track down Jessica, who he says has a new, highly contagious strain of the ebola virus, which smells like a fib. She limps through the kitchen and, when asked, says it’s an injury from running. Well, at least they’re both lying; a few scenes later, Elsa powwows on a Zoom meeting with a counselor and a woman in a wheelchair, there to help Elsa in the wake of her ALS diagnosis. “Are you thinking about suicide?” the woman asks in a voice clearly impeded by the disease. “Yeah,” Elsa replies.

Thus, the dynamic: Yes, Jessica is infected with something communicable, and, as we’re soon to learn, deeply troubling and very very gross, but most importantly, deadly as hell. And Elsa, possibly because she’s losing her will to live and may have nothing to lose, has been selected to find this contagious woman. Recurring flashbacks show Jessica and her boyfriend Ian (Nick George) caring for a stray dog during a camping trip; they get rashes, Ian gets deathly ill, and they’re scooped up by apparent black-ops guys and locked in a scary facility. In the present, Jessica gets help from a couple of kind farmers, who feed her and give her a ride. Elsa communicates with her superiors while trying to find Jessica, all the while using a cane to deal with a foot that won’t do what she wants – and an increasingly shaky right hand, the same one she uses to hold her pistol. It’s tense.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It might be a slight spoiler, but IMDb tags New Life as “zombie horror,” so saying it brought to mind 28 Days Later doesn’t give too much away.

Performance Worth Watching: Erin and Walger ably carry equal dramatic loads here, and find nuance in their characters despite the brief run time (85 minutes) and a somewhat bare-bones script.

Memorable Dialogue: The unnamed woman with ALS shares some wisdom with Elsa: “Misery is powerful, but so is acceptance.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: New Life’s dramatic engine runs on the compare/contrast dynamic of its two leads, who run parallel to each other in terms of desperation and the assumption that they’re both doomed. Rosman neatly situates their stories within a massive existential threat, that Elsa is trying to thwart a likely apocalypse. That “likely” bears a lot of weight, because the extremely limited scale of the production undermines the larger story in numerous ways, e.g., why, if Jessica is a threat to the global population, do authorities send one woman after her? A woman who obviously hasn’t been properly vetted for the most important job in the history of the world (at least since Oppenheimer), because she’s trying to hide the fact that she can’t walk or hold a gun properly?

I mentioned plot holes earlier; these are the big ones, and some thematic threads remain frustratingly underdeveloped (like Elsa’s obsession with classic Bob Dylan tune Like a Rolling Stone). But Rosman gives us the sense that he’s doing the best with the few tools he had, his thematic and narrative ambitions are prevalent, he gets some earnest emotional moments out of Erin and Walger and he cultivates a strong sense of tension and dramatic consequence. In a vacuum, New Life is watchable; properly contextualized, it’s a rock-solid mishmash of thriller and horror elements.  

Our Call: Rosman also gives us the sense that his next movie will be better still. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.