Movie Review – “Quarantine”

It’s easy to peg “Quarantine” as another “Blair Witch Project” rip-off with some “Night of the Living Dead” thrown in for good measure, but it’s distinctive enough where it counts and avoids such generic labeling. Like “Blair Witch,” it presents its content as footage found in the aftermath of a gruesome incident. A TV reporter named Angela (Jennifer Carpenter) and a cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) are shadowing some firemen for a human interest story when they get an apparently routine emergency call from an apartment complex. The old woman who made the call has a weird infection which begins to spread among both the other residents and the group of police officers and fire fighters who have come to help. But what really sucks is that for some unknown reason, while those inside try to attend to the old woman, the police outside appear to have decided not to let anyone in the building leave. Consequently, the ensuing struggle for order and sanity in the midst of a fast-spreading, fast-acting disease takes place in a tightly enclosed space, a tension-building strategy also used in “Living Dead.”

The movie’s basic strategies, though quite effectively executed, are nothing surprising to a horror movie fan. There’s a long “nothing’s wrong” opening sequence before the mayhem starts, a limited POV that leaves us as much in the dark (and theoretically as scared) as the confused participants, startling bursts of bloodshed, a disorienting and muddled soundtrack, etc. The movie has a lot of patience: fairly ordinary horror movie images become strangely convincing as the camera lingers on them, paralyzed. An infected woman sits motionless in front of a TV full of meaningless static, breathing hard; when the disease-control people finally make an appearance, a man in a white rubber suit enters extremely slowly, as if stopping every step or two to check in with the base. It also has some of the flaws that we expect from horror movies, especially in terms of character development. The movie is perfectly willing to let its characters interact playfully before the quarantine begins, but once we’re hunkered down in scary movie mode, we don’t get to know any of the characters in much depth; they are identified by simple emotional attachments and conventional personality traits.

Taken on its own terms, however, “Quarantine,” like any really good horror film, is fundamentally about human nature—specifically the horrible places it can go. Carpenter is charming in the opening scenes, but she also comes across as businesslike, smart, and capable at what she does. Several of the firemen insistently make dirty jokes about her, and she knows just how to handle herself—she has a sense of humor about it, but she makes it clear she doesn’t approve. When the group first realizes that they are trapped in the building, she turns to Scott and says fiercely, “Tape everything.” This seems extremely important—it positions the act of filmmaking as a blow against injustice. Angela is also always the first to denounce the officials for refusing to give those inside any information, and when policemen demand that the camera be turned off, she challenges them spiritedly. The film wears steadily on both characters’ spunkiness, though. Before long, Angela is jumping with fright at the slightest noise and looking around with wide eyes. Carpenter really goes crazy for the final section of the movie; she seems incapable of doing anything useful or of making any sound other than screaming and hard breathing. She becomes as much an animal as the infected people, who are zombie-like and aggressive, except that she is far less powerful. When a fireman who hit on her in the early minutes of the film tries to tell her a plan for getting away from the increasingly numerous infected crazies, she barely comprehends him through her fear; the contrast of this behavior with her charm and capability in earlier scenes is painful. The film gruesomely denies Angela’s faith in the politics of art and even her personal self-assuredness; she loses all of this when the shit goes down. By the time we finally get a glimpse of the sinister root of the disease, buried deep within the weird old apartment building, the characters are too obsessed with the terrifying minutiae of survival to make any sense of it beyond, “What the fuck?” The film rejects explanations, ideas, human feelings, even pleasure and pain, forcing us to look only into the darkness.