Crew
Director/Screenplay – John Rosman, Producers – Mike Marchelewski & T. Justin Ross, Photography – Mark Evans, Music – Mondo Boys, Visual Effects – 9iFX (Supervisor – Michael Miller), Makeup Effects – Ravenous Studios, Production Design – Jade Harris. Production Company – Great Lakes Vacuum Supplies Unlimited/American Storyworks.
Cast
Sonya Walger (Elsa Gray), Hayley Erin (Jessica Murdock), Tony Amendola (Raymond Reed), Jeb Berrier (Vince Harding), Ayanna Berkshire (Molly Presser), Blaine Palmer (Frank), Betty Moyer (Janie), Kevin-Michael Moore (Sal), Lisa Cross (Laura)
Plot
Jessica Murdock flees on foot, heading north, sneaking a ride in the back of a pickup truck. She is granted shelter and food by an aging farmer and his wife. She then arrives in a small town where she begs work of bar owner Molly Presser and is offered lodgings. At the same time, fixer Elsa Gray is hired to retrieve Jessica. However, Elsa is suffering from advancing motor neuron disease and is having difficulty with simple tasks like walking without a cane. As Elsa sets out to find Jessica before she crosses the Canadian border, she becomes aware that Jessica is the carrier of a mutated form of Ebola that infects and kills everyone she encounters.
New Life is a Plague and Pandemic film. In a great many ways, it is a pre-Covid pandemic film. For one, it draws on the threat being “a mutated form of Ebola” – a virus that was popular in pandemic films of the 1990s/00s but has dropped out of the limelight in terms of deadly threat after the world had to deal with Covid-19. It draws on standard imagery of the genre with people in contamination suits trying to hunt down an infectee who is spreading the contagion and less with the socially devastating consequences of the spread and threat.
New Life is a good deal more low key than most films in the Plague and Pandemic genre. It is mostly focused on two parallel story strands following Sonya Walger and Hayley Erin, each of which is a human drama. There are scenes cutting back to Walger’s tech support Jeb Berrier and brief flashback scenes where Hayley is confined but not the extended scenes of quarantine, military cordon and the race around the clock to find a cure in the laboratory that we get in most outbreak films.
In fact, New Life is more interesting as a human drama than it is as a pandemic outbreak film. For a good part of the show, it simply follows the two different story strands – Hayley Erin as she flees from something that we are not told and Sonya Walger as she is given orders to bring Hayley back, why we are also not told. It is not until around the halfway point until we realise that Hayley is a Typhoid Mary and what seemed like a story about her journey, her appealing to the kindness of strangers is actually her carrying the infection wherever she goes. Sonya’s story is the more substantial, dealing with her advancing motor neuron disease and how that is affecting her work.
It is not particularly clear what the outbreak is – in fact, the film is very vague about details in this regard. We are told it is a mutated form of Ebola. The victims we see are in a bloody mess and stagger towards characters, before having to be attacked and shot. This has led to more than one website listing New Life as a Zombie Film. However, a couple of gore-drenched people staggering about doesn’t make a zombie film. In fact, this doesn’t even make New Life a horror film – in actuality, these gore-drenched scenes would be conversant with people in the advanced stages of Ebola infection, making this far more of a standard pandemic film.
The film starts well with its human focus and you are drawn in by watching the characters. However, the latter half starts to involve conspiracies and to be following a more standard route. It is, if you like, Outbreak (1995) or one of its ilk stripped back to a very low-key drama. Usually, these are films with battalions of scientists in contamination suits, cordons and buzzing helicopters, but the big climax to stop Hayley spreading the virus is simply Sonya Walger pursuing Hayley across a field (to what we are told is the nearby Canadian border) in a contamination suit, which she tosses off anyway, and armed with no more than a handgun. It is this low-key approach that ends up defeating the film’s promise.
New Life was a directorial debut for John Rosman.
Trailer here