By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Sonya Walger, Hayley Erin and Tony Amendola
Written and directed by John Rosman
XYZ Films
NEW LIFE is a deceptively simple title for a movie with a deceptively simple setup. At its outset, it appears to be a scaled-down version of THE FUGITIVE or other man-on-the-run stories, with a gender flip: A young woman, Jessica (Hayley Erin) flees a dogged pursuer, Elsa (Sonya Walger), who behaves like she has a personal stake in tracking her down. As it turns out, there’s more to the story–a lot more–but discussing it in any detail would kill the surprise of revelation that gives the movie a good deal of its power. So I’ll begin with the promise to only discuss NEW LIFE in general terms, and the advisory to be careful how much else you read and watch about the film before you see it (a couple of the first reviews have already given away way too much).
We’re not told at the start of NEW LIFE (a world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival) why Jessica is on the lam, though her bloodied state when we first meet her makes it evident there’s some sort of awful crime in her very recent past. She’s making her way through the rural Pacific Northwest, attempting to make it to Canada, and Erin’s vastly sympathetic performance immediately gets us on her side, even as Jessica resorts to breaking and entering and we’re not sure whether she might have done something much worse than that. Certainly Elsa, who works for an unspecified government agency, and Raymond Reed (Tony Amendola), who remotely advises and guides her, believe it’s crucial that Jessica be captured before she can cross the border and disappear.
Walger, from LOST and FOR ALL MANKIND, keeps us involved with her own part of the story; Elsa is far from a cold-hearted villain, but a woman still trying to prove herself in the waning years of her job. She’s facing a very specific, harrowing obstacle to continuing on with it, which…nope, not gonna give that away either. Suffice it to say that, as performed with deep feeling by Walger, this issue lends an acute sense of urgency to everything Elsa does while giving her a secret of her own to keep, and neatly ties in with Jessica’s predicament–what we eventually learn about it–on a thematic level.
First-time feature writer/director John Rosman comes from an Emmy-winning background in media journalism, and he brings a documentarian’s dedication to reality and attention to detail to NEW LIFE. As Jessica makes her way through the grittily picturesque Oregon locations, finding unexpected help from strangers while knowing she can’t enjoy their kindness for long, we feel like we’re traveling right along with her, alert for any signs of encroaching danger. And for all the high tech that Elsa’s employers utilize to track Jessica, with occasional glimpses of computer readouts and surveillance images, Elsa alone does the ground work, relying on her tracking skills and a little bit of luck to find and apprehend her quarry.
Now, pretty much all that’s been described here takes place in the movie’s first 40 minutes or so. Once we learn the specifics of why Jessica is trying to escape and Elsa is so determined to bring her in, the story is thrown into entirely new relief, the stakes are exponentially raised, earlier parts of Jessica’s odyssey develop tragic dimensions–and NEW LIFE becomes much more of a horror film. The grounded quality Rosman has brought to the scenario thus far allows the more bluntly shocking elements he introduces in the second half to hit that much harder, and with far more resonance than in many more traditional movies on the same subject. And even once we learn the basics of what’s going on, Rosman has still more to reveal to us, using judicious, well-timed flashbacks to explain exactly how Jessica got to this point, unfolding further layers of backstory that make her circumstances all the more distressing.
NEW LIFE stands not only as one of the year’s most gripping and tense films, but among the strongest genre debuts in recent memory. Rosman’s control over his material is all the more laudable for being so unshowy; he eschews attention-getting tricks and quietly, powerfully serves the narrative at every turn. That goes for his collaborators as well, from cinematographer Mark Evans and production designer Jade Harris, who provide the film a naturalistic, lived-in environment even as the events within it spiral out of control, to Christina Kortum and Ravenous Studios, creators of the skin-crawling makeup effects. The music by Mondo Boys accentuates the drama and the terror throughout–right down to the end, where Rosman perfectly times it to bring NEW LIFE to a perfect conclusion.
