New Life (2023)
Directed & Written by John Rosman
Starring Sonya Walger, Hayley Erin, Tony Amendola, Ayanna Berkshire, Nick George, Blaime Palmer, & Jeb Berrier.

Horror / Thriller

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS!
Turn back,
lest ye be spoiled.

In the continuing wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, John Rosman’s New Life made a profound impact at Fantasia 2023. The film follows two women: Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin), a woman on the run, and Elsa Grey (Sonya Walger), a fixer called in by the government to hunt Jessica down. Jessica is unaware of the real reason she’s had to flee from everyone and everything she knows. She also doesn’t know that she and the woman hunting her share a connection. They’ve each been afflicted in different ways, but they’re both being manipulated. Their lives are puzzle pieces in a larger game that affects America and, maybe, the whole world.

New Life confronts the new realities global society has faced since the pandemic’s outbreak, as well as explores the ways in which the pandemic has revealed not only the ineptitude of government, but also the cruelty of so many who were willing, and remain willing, to sacrifice the elderly, the ill, and others most vulnerable to infection for the so-called ‘greater good.’ Elsa’s subplot in the film looks at how people with various illnesses were treated as socioeconomic fodder throughout the pandemic, whereas the main plot focused on Jessica is a tale of the damage done by asymptomatic people who, early on unknowingly, spread COVID-19 to others. Both women are ultimately pawns of the government, only in such desperate situations respectively because of the government’s deviousness and lack of transparency. In the end, Jessica and Elsa are each affected by virus and disease, albeit in drastically different ways, yet their manipulation under the thumb of government ties them together, just like most of society, especially the working class, found ourselves tied together when the pandemic erupted into collective life.
Elsa’s subplot takes on its deep significance when we figure out she’s been diagnosed with ALS. She meets a woman with ALS who explains that Elsa will feel “like a prisoner” in her own body and will “mourn” her “old life,” but that she will also learn about the strength of the human spirit “in deep and profound ways.” Elsa represents the expendable people of the COVID-19 pandemic, as far as many in the government and general public were concerned—the ill, the immunocompromised, and the elderly. Her story in the film reveals, like the pandemic did, how people view the disabled as generally expendable bodies; people who are already halfway dead. One of the government men tells Elsa she’s “a talented fixer without a family who‘s on her way out” and that she “can and should carry the weight” of a mission like the hunt for Jessica. This statement goes even beyond the ill, the elderly, and the immunocompromised by suggesting that those without families are likewise expendable. They see Elsa as “a woman who’s already dead” and thus fit “to be on the frontline of the apocalypse.” A genuinely horrifying attitude, and all the worse because it’s the way real people in the real world have felt since COVID-19 was loosed upon the Earth.
What’s also interesting about Elsa being sent out to do the dirty work of the government, along with their friends in Big Pharma/Big Tech, is how it exposes the way the government fumbled so much about the COVID-19 pandemic and then tried passing responsibility down onto the individual. Since the pandemic started, the government has rarely, if ever owned their own mistakes, instead blaming the spread of the virus on individuals not following rules, and while many did follow the rules, the pandemic never would’ve been so bad if the responses from all governments weren’t so fractured and all too often poorly coordinated. Elsa becomes the last hope to stop a possible “international outbreak,” a single person charged with holding back a viral apocalypse; a supremely unfair deal.

Jess must bear the weight of carrying a deadly virus unknowingly, which ties into the way COVID-19 spread widely due to people being asymptomatic, and how for quite a while it wasn’t common knowledge that someone outwardly healthy could be carrying the virus, passing it onto others. Jess being asymptomatic while “a healthy carrier” of the virus and leaving only death behind her is a grim horror film vision of how there were good people out there accidentally infecting others in the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days, which led to a lot of sick people and many deaths.
We eventually find out about how Jess wound up infected by something “never supposed to see the light of day” outside the lab during a camping trip. The film doesn’t lean too far into conspiracy theory territory, yet Rosman’s screenplay makes room for such ideas. There still remains a concern among many that COVID-19 was a manufactured virus, and though there is plenty of hard scientific evidence to suggest otherwise, we can never put it past any government to do dark, scary things to its own people.
Despite New Life verging on nihilism it actually has a glimmer of hope running through it in Elsa, whose own issues with the body and disease have made her more understanding than others that might otherwise be hunting down somebody like Jessica. She offers Jessica a modicum of mercy, in spite of the fateful outcome. She also questions the government being in bed with a “pharmaceutical company” slash “technology conglomerate” who originally created the virus now wreaking havoc.
Most importantly, Elsa refuses to accept that being ill or having a disabled body means that she is no better than a commodity to be used up and discarded. Once everything’s over we see Elsa learning to live with her ALS, as she prepares for “a lot of good living left to do” and plans construction for her house to help her physically manage the way her body is about to start changing. She accepts, just as she told Jessica, that she “can‘t run from this” anymore.

Jessica’s story doesn’t end how many would hope, but Elsa is able to see a new life for herself beyond the illness that’s become her new reality. In the real world, we’ve had to shift to a new version of life since the COVID-19 pandemic started, too. We work more from home, most of us pay a little more attention to hand washing than ever before, a lot of us are still wearing masks, and so much more. Unfortunately we’ve come to a point where living with COVID-19 is an inevitable part of our new collective life, so, like Elsa, we have to learn to live with it somehow. There’s no more outrunning COVID-19 thanks to the government’s awful handling of the pandemic, among other things, which turned so many good, normal people into death-seeking missiles that have left human-shaped craters all across the globe.