Sometimes, the premise of a film is not especially promising. I can’t count the number of films I’ve passed over because they’re about a family whose darkest secret has come back to haunt them, or about a house or hospital or whatever hiding an ancient evil, or about a mysterious force terrorizing someone. You get the idea.
I’m probably a little pickier than I should be, if I’m being completely fair. There really are only so many ways you can describe any kind of film (I mean, the blurb for Hereditary is “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences,” which doesn’t even begin to capture the scope of that film) and I’d rather it be too vague than give too much away any day. But when you don’t know anything else about the film, it’s tough, because generic descriptions make it easy to assume that the film itself is generic. And when you run across enough that are just as generic as their description makes them sound, that doesn’t help.
But then, every now and then, I’ll run across one that grabs me, Not necessarily because it’s compelling - those do happen, though they’re few and far between - but because it seems just improbable or odd enough to pique my curiosity. And I gotta say, Isolation was absolutely one of those. It’d been on my radar for some time, and the premise, on paper, sounds deeply silly. But in practice it isn’t. It’s a somber, tense monster movie that works better than you'd think
After an opening credits sequence that reminds me of old Nigel Kneale films (this is a good thing), we’re introduced to Dan and Orla. Dan owns a cattle farm in rural Ireland, and Orla is a veterinarian who’s come out to look at one of his cows. The cow is pregnant, and there’s something special about her - she’s being kept separate from the rest of the herd, in her own pen. We don’t get a lot of details right away, but apparently Dan, whose farm is in the red financially, took some money from a scientist named John, who works for Bovine Genetics Technology, to let John test a new genetic procedure on some of his stock, and Orla’s been contracted by the same company to do the check-ups. There’s tension there, and some history between them. But Orla is a professional, so she gloves up and lubes up to check on the calf. Everything seems normal...
...until something bites her hand. Calves don’t do that. Especially not unborn calves.
The broad strokes, then, are pretty clear. John is working on some kind of genetic modification that will make cows more fertile at a younger age, and allow their calves to grow faster. Dan’s cow is a test subject, her calf a product of this modification, and Orla discovers pretty quickly that there is something...extremely wrong with the calf. And while this is all going on, Dan has to deal with a Traveller couple who are parked up on the road just outside his property. John doesn’t want them there because of security issues, and Dan doesn’t especially want them there either, but the couple - Jamie and Mary - seem desperate, cornered. They’re hiding from something or someone and don’t want to budge. And then that night, the cow goes into labor. Dan can’t reach Orla because his phone service got shut off. So he recruits Jamie to help him deliver the calf himself. And in the process, Dan gets bitten as well.
Like I said, there’s something very, very wrong with the calf.
When the brief for a film is "mutant cow terrorizes people on a remote Irish farm," you expect it to be silly, played for camp and laughs, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't go into it thinking "okay, how is this gonna work," but honestly? It worked better than I thought it would. A lot of this comes down first to the setting - there's a gap between the romanticized and realistic depictions of farms in film, and this is very much a real, working farm, gray and muddy and rain-sodden, corrugated metal sheds and rusting chutes and pens. Everything is overcast and gloomy, which sets the tone right from the start, and the setting helps ground the premise as well. It's a working farm, and so there's nothing romantic or sentimental about the livestock, just animals in their pens, lots of rain, mud, and shit. This contributes to the larger sense of biological horror as well - just the process of delivering a calf is already pretty hard to watch, all winches and ropes and fluids and steam, so perversions of it have their own horror while still feeling of a piece with the setting. The biological modification of animals through hormones and selective breeding is already all too common in the livestock industry, so really this isn't that much of a step away from real life, even if the results are even more horrific than usual. .
So the setting is suitably grim, and on top of that, everything is played completely straight - there are no nods and winks to the audience about the absurdity of the premise or anything. Something very bad has happened here and these five people are going to have to deal with the consequences, and that's the most important part. It all takes place over maybe two days or so, just five people basically caught in the middle of a crisis, the implications of which necessitate quick action, before something starts to spread. This seriousness extends to how the story is told as well. The characters are sketched in enough to be believable as people, though John does start to verge on mad-scientist caricature toward the end - it's not exactly that, he's acting both from desperation and a sense of what the stakes are, but it feels a little abrupt. But you get a sense of who these people are to each other and what’s going on without too much unnecessary exposition. The dialogue is mostly believable, maybe a little exposition-y at the top of the third act, when everything starts to escalate, but all in all, the setting and the sense of restraint help sell what could have been a deeply goofy premise. It’s paced well, setting the table economically and then developing the premise gradually so that by the time we have a sense of just how wrong everything has gone, it's time for shit to get real in the third act, which is when the tension really starts building and this farm at night, all industrial equipment and moisture and fitful lighting, isn't all that different from the guts of the Nostromo. I’m not saying this film is as good as Alien - few are - but it’s definitely cut from the same cloth, and that’s entirely to its credit.
It does have some problems - there's a disease subplot that only comes up fitfully, and we could have used maybe just a little more background on the nature of John's research. Not a whole lot more, I'd rather a film under-explain than over-explain any day, but some stuff is hinted at maybe a little too obliquely and a little more detail would have added some punch. As with any monster movie, there's always the problem of how well the creature effects are going to hold up, and though these largely do and the filmmakers are mostly judicious in their deployment, there are a couple of moments, especially toward the end, when things get dodgy, though never for very long. And to be fair, that was a problem in Alien as well. Finally there's a story beat in the second act that, for me, pretty much telegraphed the ending, but though it does end on the note I thought it would, it’s handled with the same sense of restraint and winds everything up on a nicely inconclusive note, so it's not too huge a deal.
It's easy to forget how much of a story relies on how it’s told. A premise that sounds terrifying on paper can be risible in its execution, and something that looks goofy on paper can actually work after all. This is a film that locates monstrosity close to home, ties it into an existing context of callousness and life as commodity and takes it all seriously. It may not be an unqualified success, but it’s better than I expected, and I’ll take that any day.
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