New Life begins in an intriguing fog of mystery. Why is Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin), a young woman of seemingly unassuming background, on the run, and why was Elsa Gray (Sonya Walger), a fixer with a lot of resources, tasked to find her? John Rosman’s debut as writer and director wants us to stew in this mystery for so long that, without certain other questions being addressed, the possibility of an anticlimax becomes something more akin to an inevitability. Even at merely 85 minutes, including end credits, the film feels arbitrarily extended beyond what is believable about this simple chase story with post-apocalyptic stakes. We aren’t craving an answer to “why,” so much as we want to know who these people truly are, even though we never find that out.
Little hints of Jessica and Elsa get us some of the way there, as both women are defined by tragedy as random as it is cruel. For Elsa, it’s a bad prognosis involving a debilitating medical condition still in its early stages, as we see during a video conference with a patient further along in the disease, giving her advice about how to move forward. Walger is solid here, especially in the little details about the condition’s gradual hold on Elsa, who is sent on the Jessica-tracking mission by her boss (Tony Amendola) for reasons that cut to the core of why Elsa is the protagonist of this story. If the film had not been split into two halves, each following one of the characters, it might have been a solid character study that happened to play out against the backdrop of some potentially hazardous situation.
As it exists, though, the movie does have a second protagonist, and the plot surrounding Jessica, mysterious as it is intended to be, requires some talking around what’s really going on in the stretches following her discreet journey toward the U.S.-Canadian border. Flashbacks reveal a quiet, happy time with an old boyfriend (Nick George), who is absent during her trip along backroads and through fields in the present. She meets a kindly elderly couple (Blaine Palmer and Betty Moyer), who ply her with food and drink that she was originally going to steal from them, and then she gets a job at small-town pub, whose proprietor Molly (Ayanna Berkshire) takes pity on her and offers her a room.
Elsa and her guy-in-the-chair Vince (Jeb Berrier) are tracking all of this, by the way, because something is very wrong here. In the wake of Jessica’s path to Canada, a body count is following, and why this is happening is one of the more intriguing questions in Rosman’s screenplay. The film answers it for us in a pair of scenes that reveal both the source of Jessica’s predicament and the purpose of Elsa’s mission to find her quarry. Once all has been revealed, the movie shoves itself onto a path of inevitability and disappointment. Any genuine ideas that might have been flirted with are pushed aside for a simplistic genre exercise.
This is not illustrated any better than in a final confrontation between the two characters, which follows a subtle but thoroughly consequential and rather baffling rewrite of the film’s established rules, as well as a strange reversal of the science (which, until this point, was grounded in reality) behind those rules. Yes, this sounds vague and circular, but the entirety of New Life depends upon its secrets staying secret. Maybe that’s because Rosman is onto something with this story. It’s more likely, though, that there’s only one, underwhelming point to be made here.
Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media
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