Quar­an­tine, remade by direc­tor John Erick Dow­dle (co-written with brother Drew) from the Span­ish movie REC (2007), fol­lows in the now-firmly estab­lished hor­ror faux­men­tary tra­di­tion. Pre­vi­ous entries Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, and Clover­field are all osten­si­bly com­prised of found footage recov­ered from cam­eras found at the scenes of hor­rific dis­as­ters. Quarantine’s only wrin­kle is that, unlike its pre­de­ces­sors, this pre­tense is not explained as such on screen. Quarantine’s con­ceit is that we’re watch­ing raw footage, edited in-camera, aban­doned by the late char­ac­ters them­selves. There are no implied, unseen sur­vivors that picked up the pieces.

Clover­field (read The Dork Report review) never pro­vided a con­vinc­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tion to explain why its cin­e­matog­ra­pher would keep his cam­corder run­ning through­out his des­per­ate flight from toxic alien crea­tures swarm­ing across Man­hat­tan. A much more intel­li­gent exam­i­na­tion of an obses­sion to cap­ture every­thing on video came from the less expected source of none other than the zom­bie god­fa­ther him­self, George A. Romero. His under­rated Diary of the Dead (read The Dork Report review) fea­tures a group of young film stu­dents with pre­ten­sions to becom­ing great doc­u­men­tar­ian film­mak­ers, and what bet­ter sub­ject to doc­u­ment than their own first-hand expe­ri­ences dur­ing a zom­bie out­break? Although Clover­field had sig­nif­i­cantly greater bud­getary resources at its dis­posal to cre­ate eerily real­is­tic images of Man­hat­tan crum­bling beneath the feet of a Godzilla-like mon­ster, Quar­an­tine fol­lows in the more mod­est foot­steps of Diary of the Dead in striv­ing for greater psy­cho­log­i­cal realism.

ground floor, com­ing up

In story terms, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Quarantine’s char­ac­ters to keep film­ing con­tin­u­ally evolve as their cir­cum­stances worsen. Like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (read The Dork Report review), Quar­an­tine fea­tures mem­bers of the press as main char­ac­ters. The first full 12 min­utes are devoted to reporter Angela Vidal (Jen­nifer Car­pen­ter) and cam­era­man Scott Per­ci­val (Steve Har­ris) shoot­ing a tele­vi­sion news seg­ment on a local fire depart­ment. By the time an emer­gency finally arrives and the duo hitches a ride along to the scene, we’ve become fully endeared to the bub­bly, spunky reporter and the charm­ingly filthy fire­fight­ers. As the rou­tine inves­ti­ga­tion turns into a con­fronta­tion with a feral-seeming elderly woman, Angela senses the oppor­tu­nity to score some sen­sa­tional footage. It’s clear she fan­cies her­self a more seri­ous reporter.

Later, as the elderly woman is revealed to be patient zero for a new highly con­ta­gious dis­ease, the Los Ange­les Cen­ter for Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­ease quickly quar­an­tines the build­ing, cut­ting off all their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and falsely report­ing to the pub­lic that it has been evac­u­ated. The trapped ten­ants are a ran­dom assort­ment of Los Ange­lans: an opera tutor and his hot young live-in pro­tégé, a vet­eri­nar­ian, a clean­ing woman, a mom and her baby (whom we meet again near the end of the film, in hor­ri­fy­ing trans­formed fash­ion), toy dogs, an immi­grant cou­ple, and… what’s miss­ing? That’s right! If this is L.A., where are all the unem­ployed actors?

Build­ing man­ager Yuri (Rade Serbedz­ija) keeps con­ve­niently remem­ber­ing exits (includ­ing a back door and a base­ment entry to a sewer), but all are blocked. By this point, Angela has mor­phed into a right­eous cru­sader want­ing more footage as proof of the city’s out­rage against jus­tice and human rights. But when the virus spreads to most of the peo­ple trapped in the build­ing, the power goes off, and panic truly sets in, Angela’s moti­va­tions switch to pure sur­vival. The cam­era now only proves use­ful as a source of light, and any­thing cap­tured on video hap­pens by chance as they fran­ti­cally nav­i­gate through the cor­ri­dors. Then, in true hor­ror movie fash­ion, things get even worse. In a scene rival­ing the nail-biting base­ment sequence in Silence of the Lambs, Angela and Scott find them­selves bar­ri­caded in a pitch-black attic with their camera’s lamp bro­ken. The remain­der of the movie is seen through the green­ish haze of their night-vision filter.

In true hor­ror movie fash­ion, Angela (Jen­nifer Car­pen­ter) sheds lay­ers of cloth­ing through­out her ordeal

While Quar­an­tine may seem to tip its hat to hor­ror tra­di­tion as pro­tag­o­nist Angela sheds lay­ers of cloth­ing over the course of her ordeal, the movie is actu­ally quite sub­ver­sive in show­ing her lose her spirit. Atyp­i­cally for a hor­ror movie pro­tag­o­nist, she is no plucky sur­vivor that defeats the men­ace. She pretty much just breaks down.

Quar­an­tine may be yet another in a long line of zom­bie flicks, but I would argue its true genre iden­tity is as an urban night­mare. Clover­field relived 9/11 in the form of another Godzilla and its highly toxic babies, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic envi­sioned swarms of giant cock­roaches breed­ing in aban­doned sub­way sta­tions. Quar­an­tine touches on another deep anx­i­ety of urban dwellers: a viral con­ta­gion born of city filth. The entire out­break plays out in the con­fines of an aging ten­e­ment build­ing (with what seems to be a cloth­ing sweat­shop hid­den in the back), a place many city slick­ers might rec­og­nize as home.

What made Quar­an­tine the most fright­en­ing for me in par­tic­u­lar was not the gore or the booga-booga scare fac­tor, but rather the dis­turb­ing plau­si­bil­ity of its fic­tional dis­ease. In real­ity, all we hear about are the dan­gers of dis­eases like HIV jump­ing from bush­meat to humans, and the avian or swine flu incu­bat­ing in impov­er­ished nations where peo­ple live in close quar­ters with ani­mals. What about those of us liv­ing in devel­oped, sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized cites, full of dogs, roaches, rats, and yes, a cer­tain num­ber of crazy nutjobs?

A hyper-evolved form of the rabies virus is the most plau­si­ble pseudo-scientific expla­na­tion I’ve yet heard for zom­bies, espe­cially com­pared to the vaguely described Venu­sian radi­a­tion in Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (read The Dork Report review). Like the “super­flu” in Stephen King’s The Stand and the dis­tilled “rage” virus in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, this strain of rabies was genet­i­cally engi­neered by a lone ter­ror­ist holed up in the attic of the ten­e­ment. An omi­nous clue is dropped halfway through the film about an unaccounted-for ten­ant liv­ing in the attic. When we finally meet him, he appears to have been infected for quite some time. Blind and ema­ci­ated, he scram­bles around in the total dark­ness of his for­mer home and lab­o­ra­tory (scat­tered with dis­gust­ing med­ical pho­tos and news­pa­per clip­pings about Dooms­day Cults). The creepy fig­ure is played by the unusu­ally tall and slen­der Doug Jones, most recently seen as the Sil­ver Surfer in Fan­tas­tic Four and Abe Sapien in Hell­boy. I worked on the offi­cial web­site for Guillermo Del Toro’s mar­velous Pan’s Labyrinth, for which Jones was inter­viewed about his expe­ri­ences play­ing The Faun and The Pale Man; for some­one that so typ­i­cally plays mon­sters, he’s a super-nice, funny, and charm­ing dude. I skimmed through the bonus fea­tures on the Quar­an­tine DVD, and it’s a cry­ing shame that he appar­ently wasn’t interviewed.

In place of a musi­cal score, Quar­an­tine fea­tures a com­plex sound design built around an eerily creak­ing, groan­ing old build­ing. It also for­goes other stan­dard movie plea­sures, being a grue­some, depress­ing, and pun­ish­ing expe­ri­ence. In that respect, it’s sim­i­lar to how the nau­se­at­ingly (lit­er­ally) bleak Blind­ness (read The Dork Report review). In con­trast, the sub­lime Chil­dren of Men (read The Dork Report review) is the rare movie night­mare set at the brink of the end of human­ity that nev­er­the­less car­ries a spark of uplift and hope.

Offi­cial movie site: www.ContainTheTruth.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.