Director: Thomas Haley
Year: 2020
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Drama/Thriller
Plot:
After a mysterious virus has wiped out much of the world’s population, with the remaining sick being corralled in quarantine zones, one man fights to find a cure to save humanity and himself while slowly succumbing to the disease and losing his grip on reality.
Review:
This is a fairly serviceable indie thriller. Granted the limited budget on display, the focus on the discovery of the potential cure leads the majority of the film rather nicely, making for a genuinely tense race to uncover what the virus is and how to stop it. As this is mostly fueled by the backstory involving the outcome of the plague on mankind and how the treatment of those infected comes to play out with them being taken to quarantine-zones out of the way of society and leaving him alone by himself. This engenders more of a psychological approach than anything else as the focus turns into him being by himself in the clinic trying to come up with a means of synthesizing the solution and saving humanity while occasionally distracting himself with the various items around the facility or flashbacks to his previous life with his wife. These cause the breaks in his sanity as the conversations about these events to bring about his lost grip with the quest to save everyone.
In spite of all this, there’s not much else going on here. The limited look and feel that’s on display here is minimalist to the point of essentially being a one-person show for roughly the entire film with fleeting glimpses of various figures in his life on his quest to get everything sorted out, eventually resulting in overwhelming sections where nothing is happening. Incoherently mumbling to himself or engaging in these interactions for such long periods as this one does really hammers home the lack of spectacle or action here that most tend to think of when going for this particular genre. There’s the unfortunate tendency to revert back to these so often as well in the latter half that the film feels way too thin and bare-bones to support such a feature-length running time and would’ve been better served with a fully-functioning B-story or trimmed down into a short as the film drags as is. However, it’s more the lack of action that holds it back.
Overview: **/5
A much lower-grade type of apocalyptic drama/thriller that works on the tension of trying to come up with what he’s doing, the lack of action and drama-focused setup might be a slight turn-off for those expecting something else here. Give this a chance if you’re a fan of the genre or looking for this type of micro-budget effort, while anyone looking for spectacle or activity in their films should avoid it for the most part.
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