The recent worldwide pandemic has provided filmmakers with an abundance of inspiration, from lockdown anxiety movies (2022's Alone Together and Sick, for example) to an appropriation of the 'walking dead' genre (Corona Zombies from 2020, anyone?). But it's the moody 2023 HBO series The Last of Us which provides Canadian filmmaker Lowell Dean with a visual template for a viral infection movie with a difference.
Ethan (Elijah Wood lookalike Douglas Smith) is an amnesiac, struggling to hold on to fractured memories of his life with girlfriend Emma (Kimberley-Sue Murray). His condition is exacerbated by the world around him, torn apart as a result of a viral epidemic, emanating not from a lab but the natural world.
In the search for his girlfriend Ethan has only a smattering of information; they may have been in a car accident and he has a plaster on his arm (applied by Emma, a doctor). Coming across a farmhouse, he is taken in by an older woman, Mae (Carrie-Anne Moss). Her motives for providing support are unclear; she is clearly wary (and prepared; the house in which she lives is booby trapped against intruders) but also seems lonely and happy to have made a friend.
But the threats they face together take two forms; human and, well something else. For the infection of the virus results in death, followed by a plant-driven animation of the body (very The Last of Us) and the need for the re-animated corpse to feed; these creatures have been dubbed 'The Reclaimed' by conspiracy theorists. Examples of both come to call at the farmhouse, while Ethan, his amnesiac bouts becoming more frequent, struggles to keep his few memories together in order to locate Emma.
Dean wisely avoids some of the potential pitfalls of this type of film by keeping the running time to a sensible 90 minutes and concentrating on the development of the characters, a challenge because of a final reel narrative turn that I'll not reveal. As well as the aforementioned HBO show the director also borrows some of the 'amnesia revealed' tactics of Christopher Nolan's breakthrough 2000 movie Memento (in which Moss also starred) but Die Alone is its own beast, largely down to convincing turns from all involved, particularly Moss as the inscrutable Mae, some deeply strange plant/human imagery, and the bleak Canadian setting of rural Saskatchewan which provides the requisite feel of isolation.
Die Alone will be available on Home Entertainment from 10th March 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment