New Life takes a refreshing crack at a familiar horror subgenre

Courtesy XYZ Films

It’s only May and already 2024 has been packed with fantastic indie films breathing new life into stories that often get recycled over and over and over. Backspot reconsiders sports movie narratives through a queer story about competitive cheerleading. Sasquatch Sunset plays with format and actor transformation to tell a surprisingly moving story about a bigfoot family. In a Violent Nature turns the established slasher movie narrative on its head. 

To that already impressive list, we can now add John Rosman’s debut feature New Life, a refreshing, resonant take on the sci-fi horror thriller that makes you sit up and take notice.

When we first meet Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin), she’s in bad shape. Her face is smeared with blood, and she clings to a messy hoodie as she navigates the alleyways on the outskirts of her town. Things aren’t better when she gets to her semi-ransacked home to change clothes, glancing in the mirror at a fungal-like growth on her abdomen. Before we can learn more, two gun-toting, black-suited men barge in, and Jessica makes a hasty escape.

Just as Jessica’s story gets going, Rosman shifts focus to Elsa (Sonya Walger), a woman about 20 years older than Jessica, who gets an unexpected visit from her boss, Raymond Reed (Tony Amendola), with an urgent job. Jessica is an experimental subject of some kind, and her escape could lead to a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Elsa, Reed’s best fixer, has every resource she needs to get the job done, but it turns out she’s hiding a secret of her own.

While New Life eventually pulls the curtain back on what’s really going on, the slow reveal and mysterious shroud are part of the journey. By keeping us solely focused on Elsa and Jessica’s perspectives for most of the film, we connect to both characters and engage in their struggles in a way that builds necessary tension. Elsa’s ALS, which she tries to hide from her co-workers, and Jessica’s revulsion at what’s been done to her body places them both in similar circumstances as women faced with a future neither of them fully understand nor want.

Even when the film does shift gears into becoming an honest-to-goodness genre picture in the back half, it never strays from the character study at its core. That’s a difficult task for established directors to wrangle with, let alone a first-timer like Rosman. He has a command over pacing and tone that could easily get shunted in favor of showier filmmaking. Managing to keep an ambitious story relatively small scale and under 90 minutes is truly a feat.

Rosman treats New Life like a mix of 70s paranoia thrillers with dashes of David Mamet’s Spartan and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. It’s a stripped-back affair focusing on only the most salient elements and practicing restraint everywhere else. Instead of spelling out exposition with dialogue in one scene, Rosman captures the relevant information as text on a computer screen, then prints it out on paper with characters’ names before fading into live action. 

With the summer season about to kick off, studios will be slinging bloated, mediocre fare to every corner of the multiplex. That makes it more important than ever to remember there are plenty of smaller films offering just as much entertainment (if not more) with better writing and more innovative filmmaking techniques. If you’d like to support that kind of art, New Life is an immensely satisfying way to do it.