(“Chew on This” is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema, analyzing the some of best movies the genre has to offer, new and old.)
It shall not end with a bang, but a whimper, so says T.S. Eliot. It is a notion curiously avoided by most post-apocalyptic film, which even when showing us a ruined, depopulated world somehow contrives to give us epic battles and huge explosions anyway. Carriers, a largely overlooked 2009 pandemic horror film manages to buck that trend, and in so doing produces a remarkably effective movie about the end of the world, one that focuses on the vast silence and loneliness that comes with the burden of survival.
Our story opens with a scene of four improbably attractive 20-somethings driving down an empty desert highway in a car they’ve obviously stolen and loaded up with salvage. Very quickly, the scene turns from casual jokes and sexual tension to one of intense dread as the protagonists encounter both the thing that can kill them, and the thing worth living for: another person.
Our world has been decimated by a vague pathogen of some kind that is highly communicable, very fast-moving, and completely fatal. There is no cure, aside from avoiding exposure, and that is the heart and soul of Carriers: the only way to survive a world that has been destroyed by disease is to stay away from infected people at all costs. But when infection itself is so easy to come by, survival itself becomes its own form of punishment. What does it matter to stay alive, if you must do so utterly alone and paranoid?
With that premise in mind, Carriers becomes a grim kind of road movie, with our heroes trying to get across the desert so that they might arrive at a vacation spot they remember as kids. The point being that the world might have ended, but if they can just make it to Turtle Beach, then maybe the world as they remember it might still be around, even if only a little. But the way is long and meeting other people is a certainty, and therein lies the danger. Nothing is as it ought to be in this world, and what should be a father and daughter, or a doctor at a clinic, or a team of scientists all turn out to be something quite different. And, in their own ways, deeply unsettling.
This little girl doesn't know it, but she's about to make a life-altering decision.
Carriers is an unusual movie in that it knows its source material intimately and follows its most logical conclusions, opting to portray what’s likely to happen in the scenario it portrays, rather than manufacture unlikely scenarios that fit neatly into typical Hollywood storytelling. In many ways, this is one of the most low-key horror movies you will ever watch. There aren’t many jump scares to be had (I cannot recall one, come to think of it), what little gore there is is presented in a natural and even predictable fashion. And the kinds of conflicts you expect to arrive in an end-of-the-world movie – predatory survivors in particular – come out in a refreshingly understated way. The world has ended, and with it all of the laws and comforts we take for granted. But it hasn’t turned the world into a guns-and-thunder war zone, either. What results is something more subtle, something much more quiet, and something infinitely horrifying. The shock here is not in creeps that jump out of the shadows, or maniacs with knives, but in the choices that must be made in order to survive. The characters who make it in this setting do so only because they can harden their hearts in ways that simply are not conceivable in a world that has not met the apocalypse. You just have to be willing to give this story some patience and let it sink in after the credits roll to get the full effect.
The doctor is in. This is not a good thing.
This might explain why Carriers is such an overlooked movie. I had not heard of it at all and discovered it only while looking for something to watch on Netflix streaming. The cover art showed what looked to be the cast of Dawson’s Creek trying to look tough, and were it not for the high rating the movie had, I would have passed it by, too. I hadn’t noticed initially that this stars Chris Pine and was made well before he appeared as James Kirk in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. He plays a bit of an impetuous jerk in this movie, too, though with more depth than what we find in Kirk. Here, he comes off as a character who, in regular times, might have just turned out to be another knuckleheaded frat boy. But he has been hardened by witnessing the destruction of the world, and he fiercely defends not only his right to survival, but that of his family members, also. A common theme of post-apocalypse stories is rebirth; who you are after the Fall. For some, it is a matter of redemption. For others, it is a descent into savagery. Pine shows us how one person can undergo both, and it is a character study we don’t often get in movies like this.
Sooner or later, everybody looks like this. Or will they?
Some critics have written off this movie as The Road Warrior without the car chases, and The Road without the love story. That’s a bit unfair, I think, for this explores an entirely different territory, the art of survival in a world so recently dead that the body is still warm. The reality of the apocalypse hasn’t quite sunken in to our characters yet, even though the immediate threat of death lurks around every corner. The things that motivate these characters seem to be suspended in the vain hope that maybe, somehow, things might return to normal. The horror of this movie isn’t that things have gone wrong. It is the mounting evidence that never again will they ever be right.
DYLMAG Rating: 7
