Viewers should have the greatest possibility of enjoying Rosman’s genre-switching debut New Life by going in cold, with as few details about its plot or themes as possible. This makes it a tricky movie to review and inform its potential audience about. Now available streaming on-demand, it is a movie worth checking out by fans of SF thrillers, apocalyptic cinema, and horror. Yet, New Life never really steps fully into any of those genres. Foremost, it is a generic thriller, whose plot developments and backstory tangentially intersect genre staple touch points now and again.
Though not without faults, New Life succeeds in telling its story and grappling with themes in an interesting way that should captivate audiences. As long as the audience hasn’t been completely ruined by fast-paced media trends that constantly barrage viewers for attention without time for deep engagement. New Life is a slow burn, with its first half (~40 minutes) proceeding without overtly revealing the true nature of the story to the audience. Shots are relatively long, dialogue is relatively sparse. But the visuals and superior acting grab attention and give audiences some clues to find footing for what exactly is transpiring.
The movie begins with a woman (Hayley Erin) on the run, bleeding. We don’t know anything about the circumstances, but she’s clearly in danger, terrified and desperate, and the people after her have guns. Later we learn her name is Jessica. We then are introduced to two other characters: Raymond (Tony Amendola) and Elsa (Sonya Walger.) Raymond seems to be a handler, running the operation of operatives that is after Jessica, mining camera feeds, and police and hospital reports for her traces. He’s sending instructions to operative Elsa, who rises in the morning with a gun and weekly pill box at the ready, looking searchingly at herself in the bathroom mirror where she’s taped a pair of handwritten affirmational quotes. The intel suggests Jessica is headed north toward the Canadian border. Elsa must stop her reaching there, but she’s also battling a medical diagnosis she’s kept secret from Raymond.
New Life begins with this and follows the thriller path of obfuscation before that halfway point where the situation of the plot becomes overtly clear with its SF and horror genre element nods. Part of that obfuscation is the nonlinear chronology of the plot. Intermittent flashbacks reveal more about Jessica’s past and what has set her upon this path. Even as the film reaches its conclusion and what the film is doing with its characters seems fairly set in the stone of genre tropes, New Life reveals some additional twists.
I had the nature of Jessica’s situation and those after her figured out very quickly after the start. This made the first part of the movie a bit more frustrating, even if still engaging with its acting and cinematography. The frustration mostly arose from the nonlinear narrative and bits of cloaked dialogue that are scripted clearly to hide things from the audience and create tension of uncertainty in what exactly is going on. It becomes unnecessary particularly when a viewer can take a few clues and figure things out early. Had the film skipped the flashback structure and just went with a linear plot, I don’t know as it would have actually been less, and for some viewers it might actually have been an improvement.
However, I was still pleasantly surprised by how things went for characters by the end, with twists that were less obvious and deviations from viewer expectations of how a certain branch of horror stories work. The movie also draws tremendous thematic strength from its comparisons between Jessica’s situation and Elsa’s medical diagnosis, of how these relate to life and death.
With its relatively slow pace, New Life finds success with its camera work and its actors. Shots of the barren, cold landscape of the Northern Central US go well with the shots that show the turns of despair and resilience on the pair of female leads. While Hayley Erin is great (she’s done a lot of work in soap operas), she’s limited somewhat by a script that could have done more with her motivations for the choices she makes in the film. (The script actually has a few gaps in logical flow of why things happen as they do, other than they need to occur that way to permit the plot.) Sonya Walger (who you may know from Lost or the CSIverse) is absolutely fantastic, and I’ve been a fan of Tony Amendola from his turn in Stargate SG-1.
I still don’t want to be too precise in labeling New Life for it to find its audience, but fans of well-acted ponderous thrillers should appreciate it. Though technically SF and technically horror, it could be enjoyed by anyone who doesn’t gravitate (or even avoids) those genres. Though with flaws in the script, New Life suggests that John Rosman is a name to look for again in the future.
