New Life review – stripped-back virus thriller goes hard

John Rosman’s effective debut intertwines the lives of a woman escaping a black-site facility and a woman hired to contain the outbreak

Amid the dumper-truck of post-Covid lockdown-inspired films, very few take disease and pandemics themselves as their central focus (maybe after rewatching Contagion, we were all too eager to forget). So John Rosman’s stripped-back but effective debut is a sobering flashback to those incubative early days, its title punning its title punning on the microbe that asymptomatic protagonist Jessica (Hayley Erin) is carrying on her person, as well as her hopes for a fresh start, unharassed by government spooks, north of the Canadian border.

All we know at the start is that blood-splattered Jessica has just escaped imprisonment in some black-site facility. She bundles herself into a pickup heading north, which luckily belongs to kindly farmer Frank (Blaine Palmer), who sends her on her way with a new jacket and a rucksack full of tinned food. Rosman makes gradual sense of this chaotic getaway by drip-feeding us the recent past: how a cute collie pitched up at Jessica and her boyfriend’s campsite, then shortly afterwards the latter broke out into terrifying boils and welts.