As you might expect from the buzz surrounding it, Quarantine is certainly ruthless—ruthlessly smart and also ruthlessly bleak.

In fact, if you’re the type who’ll venture into a fright flick only this time of year looking for a dark thrill ride, you may want to consider Quarantine carefully: it’s like a roller coaster all right, but one made up of a single long drop interrupted only by the occasional plateau. However, if a film committed to genuine shocks and clearly representing an improvement over other entries in the horror-verite subgenre sounds interesting—that is, if you’re a horror fan—then Quarantine is a qualified winner.


(image courtesy of Sony Pictures)

Before we move on, though, I need to confess something that predisposed to me to really enjoying Quarantine: I’m of the firm belief that star Jennifer Carpenter rocks. It’s that simple. In fact, she’s so good that when I first started admiring her sharp/funny/feisty turn as Dexter’s cop sister on the hit Showtime series, I didn’t even make the connection that this was the same actress who wowed me in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. And here, as in that film, Carpenter pulls out all the stoops. She goes from lovable, to formidable, to furious, to crazed and not only never hits a wrong note, but also pumps up the power of the script and action every step of the way. There are few other actors on screen today, certainly among those who consistently do genre work, who seem so alive that they make you feel more alive just watching them.

Which turns out to be a good thing in the case of Quarantine, since pretty much everyone around Carpenter's character, TV news reporter Angela Vidal, seems to be dropping like flies. Either that or they’re springing up from lifelessness and lunging at your throat as if it’s a slice of watermelon on a hot summer day. That’s because Quarantine’s monsters are basically hyper-kinetic cannibalistic disease vectors. Yes, that’s a mouthful, but believe me, you’ll know one of these things when you see it; what’s more, you’ll recognize what it’s similar to—a cross between a zombie and a vampire. Indeed, that’s one of the many smart moves you’ll find in the script, which pretty much echoes the Spanish hit [REC] point-for-point.

We get the excitement of the “fast-zombie” (first popularized in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake), but also the sense of contagion and shadowy menace that are part of classic vampirism. Of course 28 Days/Weeks Later did an exceptional job of accelerating the zombie into the 21st century, both literally and figuratively, but the strength of Quarantine is how it turns inside out all such broad-canvas apocalyptic epics, including I Am Legend.

Whereas in those films the audience is treated to the grim spectacle of society in full breakdown, or worse, Quarantine snaps the lid shut to trap you inside a single location where society is worse than broken—it’s irrelevant. The main characters, which include the always-underrated Jay Hernandez as a firefighter responding to a routine call, wander into hell and don’t even know it until the door is bolted behind them. In that respect, Quarantine employs the familiar dynamics of the “siege movie” but makes them subversively far more disturbing by presenting them without warning, without a drop of sunlight, and with the full knowledge that the rest of the world is not only not about to help you, but sees you as the threat. For me the subtext rang loud and clear:  If you think you can cocoon safely at home from the world’s nightmares—cults, bio-terrorism, and the ultimate failure of science/medicine—you’re fooling yourself.

The only time the movie seems to lose its footing in this deeper sense is at the finale, which while competently executed, seems to recall elements from The Descent and Silence of the Lambs too much for its own good. Great touchstones, to be sure, but when the social and political dimensions of the story diminish as the body count increases, Quarantine displays an ignorance about which of its ideas will resonate most. It’s not the purity of its nihilism, that much is clear. Insted, it’s a particular psycho-political strand of fear in which the authorities, like abusive parents, punish you without telling you why, as if they feel it’s beneath them to communicate with you openly.

With this ultra-cynical viewpoint—namely, that it’s not just disaster that we have to fear but government’s response to it—that lead me to believe that one day Quarantine may be held up as the quintessential horror response to Hurricane Katrina. So if you decide to give writer-director John Erick Dowdle’s tight thriller a chance, you’ll be rewarded with several jump-out-your-seat moments, but also plenty to think about as the houselights come on again. And that’s a good moment, by the way, because the film itself won’t leave you leave with any kind of a glow, not even a night-vision one.