Normally I wouldn't consider digging into Quarantine in this
space, a zombie movie that released here just last year and which I
missed for reasons that no doubt included hangovers or throwing stars.
But the other day I was up in the attic of my day job, a windowless,
pitch-black cavern where all I could see was the narrow beam of my
flashlight and absolutely anything could have been right behind
me. After I ran downstairs and stopped sobbing too hard for my
mommy to understand me, my first thought was "Dang, that was exactly
like Quarantine." So screw convention: this movie deserves
another look.
While filming a segment with L.A. firefighters, reporter Jennifer
Carpenter and her cameraman follow along on an emergency call to an
apartment building. There, a disturbed woman critically injures a
policeman, but when they try to get him outside for help, they find
themselves sealed inside the building as a highly infectious virus
spreads through the residents.
Trapping a bunch of hapless casualties inside an enclosed space with
all kinds of terrible dangers is a classic horror recipe, meaning the
difference between "tedious retread" and "so scary I couldn't leave
the house for three weeks without carrying a sword" is all in the
execution.
Director John Erick Dowdle executes like the state of Texas. He
unfolds his plot like clockwork where the clock kills you, one new
threat after the other, leaving the cast in a state of escalating
panic. Restricting the footage to a single hand-held camera just amps
up the sense of confused claustrophobia. Yet Dowdle lays out his plots
and framing so well we're able to keep up even after the survivors
have been reduced to chaotic hysterics, tearing around the apartments
one step ahead of all the awful, awful things trying to shred them
into meat confetti.
It's a ceaseless escalation of tension that leaves everyone in the
room leaning as far back from the TV as possible. I'm normally so
brave I wear cobras for bracelets and wear bracelets without fear of
getting called a girlyman, but when the finale stretched and stretched
until Carpenter was frenzied in terror and I was ready to make a
permanent move to Under My Bed Street, I started to reconsider the
virtues of cowardice.
"We should turn on all the lights now," my friend said as the credits
rolled. I agreed.
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