- 89 min. Rated R.
“They’re not gonna let us out of here alive, are they?”
Quarantine is a zombie movie for those who are sick of boring zombies. Fast and highly entertaining, it draws upon sources as diverse as Night of the Living Dead, Cloverfield, and the nightly news.
I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it believable, but Quarantine does have a decent patina of reality. Compared to other members of its genre, the acting is downright incredible and the ultimately gory situation is built up in a convincing way. Our heroes are a two-person news team comprised of a pretty young broadcaster Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman Scott Percival (Steve Harris). The two of them produce a nightly show for a local news channel in Los Angeles. On March 11, 2008, they shoot a feature on firefighters and end up riding along with a crew to what seems to be a real but fairly routine medical emergency. Of course, it’s anything but. Their camera footage is the only evidence of the horrors that they alone witness as the residents of the apartment complex succumb one by one to a rabies-like disease. In addition to being incurable and pretty much instant, the disease drives infected people to bite each other to death. Think of these as fast zombies–more acutely threatening than Night of the Living Dead, less goofy than Zombieland. Also, not literally dead. If you like your zombie movie rooted in reality, then Quarantine is probably your cup of tea.
Though documentary-type horror movies are nothing new, Quarantine is fairly creative. It plays with the cameraman’s privileges and limitations much more than Cloverfield did and presents a far more cogent threat than The Blair Witch Project. One interesting example of both camera usage and immediate threat is a pitch-black battle in which only the cameraman, who has night vision on his camera, can see anything at all. In another scene, this one particularly visceral, the cameraman actually beats an infected, bloodthirsty maniac to death with the camera as the film is running.
The actors do a decent job, but let’s face it: this is a horror movie. It stars scared people and a sexy anchorwoman (also scared). “Afraid” and “sexy” are not sophisticated states of being, and everyone pulls them off fairly well. The actors also do all right with their lines and the screaming and rabid cannibalism and whatnot. Nobody really stands out as “good” but in a horror flick, that qualifier almost doesn’t apply as far as acting is concerned. Shakespeareans they are not, but after all, Shakespeare this ain’t.
The zombie genre is an interesting comment on health and sickness. As far as Quarantine is concerned, infected people cease to be human within minutes. At best terrifying, there is no way to be sympathetic to the afflicted. A veterinarian, who ultimately identifies the illness as a kind of super-rabies, goes so far as to state in no uncertain terms that even non-super rabies is incurable and fatal once symptoms manifest. As a critic, I’m surprised that the ill make such good movie villains, since after all, they’re victims themselves. My theory is that a person too ill to socialize normally basically ceases to register as a person to the subconscious minds of their fellow humans, conversation being what separates people from animals in the first place. This may also explain why Hollywood shows us many fast zombies like those present in Quarantine, but very few articulate zombies.
Most of what happens in Quarantine is relatively plausible. That said, there are some pieces that obviously don’t fit. The remote mic concept is good in theory, giving us a way to hear what was happening with characters who were a few rooms distant, but I couldn’t help noticing that mic’d characters didn’t always transmit consistently. For example, I might be able to hear the sound of a drill or a tussle, but not of a mic’d character’s voice or screams. A more glaring error took me out of the story for a minute: an infected child takes much longer to manifest symptoms than any of the other characters. These are little details, but they do stand out.
While the lack of light amplifies the terror, it also makes some of the action confusing. The shakycam doesn’t help. I never did feel lost, though, which may be a noteworthy achievement in itself. The film tends to show rather than tell, giving its audience credit for details like the fact that the building’s rats could be transmitting the virus.
Quarantine is a fine horror film, though probably not in the top ten of the decade. It’s worth seeing it for outbreak genre buffs and non-horror fans looking for a watchable film on Halloween.
