NEW LIFE And the New Zombie Disability

Covid has, at least provisionally, challenged the zombie genre

Zombie contagion narratives have been metaphors for racism, for communist takeover, for humanity’s animalistic urges. Somewhat oddly given the fact that zombie plagues are generally figured as plagues, the genre rarely has engaged disease and disability directly.

Covid, though, has changed that. The Sadness, from a couple of years back, was an extremely vicious zombie pandemic film which was more or less directly about pandemics. And now, writer/director John Rosman’s  movie New Life treats the zombie apocalypse as a metaphor for long term disability and chronic illness.

[Lots of spoilers follow, if you are concerned about that sort of thing.]

The movie is told out of chronological order to better snap you about with the pulpy plot twists, but for our purposes it’s easier to straighten out the switchbacks. Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin) and her boyfriend are out camping when they are infected with a terrifying zombie virus by a stray dog escaped from a lab. They are quickly restrained by the dopes who let the dog escape. Boyfriend dies, but dopes let Jessica escape because (again) they are dopes. She tries to head for Canada, unaware that she is an asymptomatic carrier, infecting everyone in her path. She is pursued by an elite team led by Elsa Gray (Sonya Walger), an experienced agent who has ALS and is rapidly losing muscle function.

At first the film follows Jessica and her flight. But gradually it becomes clear that this is Elsa’s movie. The global apocalypse provides the genre beats, but thematically it’s mostly there to echo Elsa’s personal apocalypse. An active action hero proud of her professionalism and her independence, she has to reconcile herself to using a cane and to the inevitable end of the disease, when she will be, as another ALS patient says, a prisoner in her own body. For her (and of course for Jessica) there is no escape.

From that perspective, New Life could be read as Elsa’s daydream or as a psychotic break. Faced with her own fate worse than death, she fantasizes the destruction of the entire world—a new zombie life for all interposing between her and the personal, zombie-like self-alienation she can expect to experience. She despises the disease-of-the-week narrative, with its tear-jerker moments and inspiration porn. If she’s going to have a new life, she’d rather it be as a lone survivor, or as one of the pustule covered zombies. Anything but as a chronic patient with an ever-more-limited existence.

It's an affecting metaphor and an affecting idea, but the execution (in various senses) doesn’t quite work. It takes too long to establish Elsa as the emotional center of the film, especially with the brisk 84-minute run time. Rosman builds Jessica up as the protagonist, then abandons her at her moment of greatest emotional crisis. The powerful themes—of bodily betrayal; of mourning your past; of accepting the new world, no matter how frightening—get lost in the jump scares and (especially) in the genre impulse to keep viewers off balance, rather than demanding they sit still for a minute and live with discomfort, as chronically ill patients are forced to do.

You could say that the film, like Jessica, and like Elsa too, is running from its own conclusions, and from its own new life. It sprints like zombie films of old, rather than really chewing on what it might mean for a zombie to be disabled, or for a disabled person to be a zombie.  New Life is an interesting, but perhaps too tentatively hidebound, effort to crawl towards the terrain opened up for horror by one of our recent apocalypses. It’s not a must see. But it’s determination to explore its new skin, with all its wounds, is worth watching if you are interested in zombies, disability, or their ugly, possibly enlightening intersection.