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Before ranting about the primary problem with Quarantine, I should first detail the myriad things it does correctly, one of which is indeed its expert handling of the limited-perspective gambit. Quarantine is a zombie/siege thriller told via the subjective eye of steel-nerved cameraman Scott (Steve Harris). The focal point of Steve's line of sight, at least initially, is his coworker Angela (Jennifer Carpenter) - Angela and Steve work on a fluffy local-interest news program that details the travails of people who work night shifts. The night of March 11th finds the two pulling an overnight at a fire station, a sleepy beat that unexpectedly becomes grim when they ride along on a disturbance call and find themselves locked in an apartment building with an increasing number of quick-moving nasty bitey things. Through this, Dowdle keeps a lock on Steve's ground-level eyewitness viewpoint - he apparently has a fascination with first-person filmmaking (his as-yet-unreleased debut The Poughkeepsie Tapes mines similar territory), so it's to his credit that the "footage" never feels less than genuine despite the presence of recognizable actors. Credit is also due to Harris, who creates a strong and likeable audience identification point despite playing all his scenes off-camera.
The film's sense of verisimilitude feeds into the tense atmosphere Dowdle works hard to build. The first act sets up its mundane universe pretty splendidly - Carpenter wanders the fire station, jokes and flirts with her two guides (Jay Hernandez & Jonathan Schaech, the latter of whom rocks an epic porno mustache) and actively wishes for something exciting to happen. Suffice to say that once the film moves into the apartment, Carpenter gets her wish; Dowdle whips up a terrific sense of dread out of whip-pans and things half-glimpsed, and he milks the spaces between anticipation and action for maximum jitters. The jolt shocks are well-spaced and expertly rendered, especially given that the structure obviates the use of music stings; there's a couple seat-leapers, notably one involving an attic near the film's end, that work like gangbusters even if you see them coming.
Or, say, even if you've seen them coming in a more literal sense. Most reviews of Quarantine have mentioned its status as a remake of a Spanish horror film entitled [REC], but the majority of writers have left it at that, presumably owing to unfamiliarity with the source. I, though, have seen [REC]. It's an excellent film, and Quarantine isn't just a remake - it's damn near a shot-for-shot Xerox. Almost everything good about Quarantine originated in its Spanish predecessor. This, then, is the film's major flaw: The existence of [REC] and Dowdle's adherence to the structure and incidence of [REC] make Quarantine a near-pointless endeavor. The only reason that Quarantine is in the marketplace, the only reason money has been sunk into recreating something that worked perfectly fine the first time around, is that Quarantine is in English, [REC] is not and the theoretical audience for a film like this - or any film released in a multiplex - doesn't want to bother with frippery like words at the bottom of the screen translating words they don't understand. It's logic borne of equal parts cynicism and depressing realism, and it bothers me mightily.
But I'm being unfair to Dowdle. This is hardly specific to his film - it's more a generalized problem with Hollywood and American film culture. And if we must have needless reduxes as sops to the semi-illiterates interspersed within the moviegoing public, best they should all turn out as well as this one. Dowdle doesn't tinker with the material's inherent strengths. There's a larger cast (read: more bodies) and a few cultural curveballs, the most interesting of which sees Steve the cameraman as a much more active participant in the action than his fly-on-the-wall Spanish counterpart (there's a bravura scene where Steve cranks up audience involvement to uncomfortable levels by beating an infected woman to death with the camera lens), but for the most part the two films are the same, which is far preferable to something like the infamous botch job visited upon The Vanishing. Quarantine may be annoyingly redundant, but it's also still scary as hell. Things, I suppose, could be a lot worse.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)