If you’ve only seen the poster for New Life you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a sci-fi movie. It isn’t, but what it actually is remains fairly opaque until (checks timings) pretty much right on the halfway mark, when debut writer/director John Rosman finally shows his hand.
It’s a good reveal and I’m not going to ruin it. Until the grand reveal New Life looks like it might be a Bourne movie on a budget, or possibly a very earthbound sci-fi movie, or maybe exactly what it appears to be, a chase thriller.
It is brilliantly economical and turns its low budget to its advantage as it spins out a story of two women. One is the hunted – and we meet Jess in the film’s opening moments covered in blood and clearly panicked. The other is the hunter, Elsa also introduced in a thumbnail sketch that reveals enough to pique our interest but saves some telling details for later on.
Rosman pushes that hunter/hunted dynamic where it emotionally wants to go. We’re on the side of Jess, who is on the run and heading for the Canadian border on foot, sneaking into the back of a station wagon here, stealing food from a barn there, occasionally meeting kind strangers who do the decent thing, as if Jess were a refugee from a 1970s TV show where, every week, she turned up in some new place and met new faces – The Hulk and Kung Fu spring to mind.
And we’re obviously not on the side of Elsa, who has tech on her side and a network behind her of urgent, gruff guys doing invasive surveillance things with computers.
What Elsa wants with Jess will reveal itself in the fullness of time, but even before it does Rosman has done a 180 with our sympathies and shifted genres quite spectacularly into the gruesome. He then goes a bit further by dicking about with his new genre a bit, upending familiar tropes by also giving them a 180 spin.
There’s a public health aspect, and contagion figures, so the recent Covid pandemic might have been in Rosman’s thoughts as he wrote it. But he doesn’t bang the drum politically, or at least that isn’t Rosman’s main concern. Sympathy is what New Life is about. He may have been inspired by Park Chan-Wook’s 2002 classic Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, first of his Vengeance Trilogy.
Matching the resourcefulness of the hunted lone woman and the lone hunter on her trail, the movie itself is resourceful, squeezing its locations for maximum effect and placing a lot of faith in its two leads – Hayley Erin as Jess and Sonya Walger as Elsa. They’re both very good as characters who are internally in turmoil but externally cool, and together keep this potentially overwrought movie’s feet firmly in reality.
Why is it so important for Elsa to stop Jess from getting over the border into Canada? The answer doesn’t really make much sense but luckily isn’t really part of the grander thrust of the movie. It’s not the only thing that doesn’t quite add up but the things that need to work do work – really good acting and support performances, low key visuals, wintry overcast locations and a strong sense of the familiar.
It’s a cracking feature debut by Rosman, a director of commercials and shorts up till now who probably won’t be doing much more of either. I don’t know if he also put together the trailer, which bends over backwards in an attempt not to let his big reveals out of the bag, but it kind of does. I’d avoid, but then that pretty much goes for all trailers, no?
New Life – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
