A mysterious woman on the run, and the resourceful fixer assigned to bring her in. The stakes of the pursuit rise to apocalyptic proportions. A film by John Rosman, starring Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George, Blaine Palmer, Betty Moyer, Ayanna Berkshire, Jeb Berrier, and Tony Amendola.

The film opens with a mysterious young woman (Hayley Erin) with her head soaked in blood, walking towards a house while cautiously looking around to ensure that she isn’t followed. The house appears to be her own house, because there’s a picture frame of her and a man, presumably her lover. She gets herself cleaned up, changes her clothes, and grabs some money. We later learn that the young woman’s name is Jessica Murdock.

Jessica then pulls a small box from a folded sock. Opening the box, she sees what appears to be her engagement ring. Suddenly, she hears the door creak open, followed by the sound of footsteps drawing closer. Jessica quietly peeps through the corner of the door frame and sees two men holding guns inside her house. She flees the house by sneaking through the window. And she continues to run away by hiding in the cargo bed of a pickup truck.

Meanwhile, in an apartment, Raymond Reed (Tony Amendola) visits Elsa Gray (Sonya Walger), one of the best fixers known for her skill and intelligence in finding the untraceable. Raymond gives Elsa the contract briefing, explaining that it’s been 36 hours since Jessica’s escape and the situation is already spiraling out of control. They believe that Jessica is heading to the border. Raymond stresses to Elsa that it’s imperative that Jessica must not cross the border.

Within a day, Raymond’s team locates Jessica on surveillance footage sneaking into the pickup truck of Harvey Moyer Michael Jr. (Tim Blough), an evangelical pastor from South Dakota. Vince Harding (Jeb Berrier) relays this information to Elsa, who’s already on the road hunting for Jessica. Six months ago, Elsa was diagnosed with ALS, a condition causing progressive muscle weakness. She has kept her diagnosis a secret.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. As motor neurons degenerate and die, they stop sending messages to the muscles, causing muscle weakness, twitching, stiffness, and wasting away. ALS often begins with muscle twitching and weakness in an arm or leg, trouble swallowing or slurred speech. As the disease progresses, it affects control of the muscles needed to move, speak, eat and breathe. There is no cure for this fatal disease.

During her trip on foot to the Mexican border, Jessica is caught attempting to steal cans of soup from a farmhouse’s storage. To her surprise, Frank Lerner (Blaine Palmer), the owner of the farmhouse, invites her to a proper breakfast prepared by his wife Janie (Betty Moyer). When asked how long she had been living on the streets, Jessica lied that she was just traveling north. The kind couple not only feeds Jessica but Frank also offers to drive her in the direction she’s headed. Frank drops her off where the road ends, and he abruptly coughs momentarily. However, he doesn’t think anything of it.

The scene flashes back to the woods where Jessica and her fiancé Ian played cards near a campfire. A stray dog approaches, and Jessica plays with it but Ian warns her not to, saying they didn’t know where it had been or what it might have been carrying. The next day, Jessica notices several red bumps on her ankle. Ian suspects the dog might have given them fleas. Then, Ian discovers similar red bumps on his stomach.

That night, Ian coughs violently, and his body displays dark discoloration, showing signs of sepsis spreading all over. An ambulance arrives, but instead of a hospital, it takes them to a black site. There, two figures in hazmat suits capture Jessica and lock her in an isolation room.

Meanwhile, Elsa receives a call from St. Patrick Hospital notifying her about a specific call from Janie Lerner a day ago, describing symptoms that match the criteria. Believing Janie has been in contact with Jessica, who’s carrying a distinctive strain of Ebola virus, Elsa races to the address given by Nurse Wagner. Donning a hazmat suit, she enters the house to find it empty, except for blood in the kitchen sink. She then proceeds to the barn, where she’s attacked by Frank and Janie, now in an advanced stage of infection that makes them look like zombies.

Ebola is a rare but severe and often fatal viral illness in humans. It is caused by the Ebola virus, which belongs to the genus Ebolavirus. Early symptoms of Ebola include fever, fatigue, headache, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, and impaired kidney and liver function. In later stages, patients may experience internal and external bleeding. Ebola was first identified in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks, one in South Sudan and the other in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ebola can be treated, but there is no cure for the Ebola virus disease.

Both Elsa and the audience are struck by a horrifying realization: this is no ordinary Ebola strain. Infuriated, Elsa confronts Raymond, asserting that he deliberately hid crucial information that endangered her life and innocent people. Frank then reveals the truth: it’s an experimental virus, unleashed when a dog escaped from AdienGen Technologies’ secure lab.

When AdienGen Technologies learned the dog had escaped, they contacted Frank to contain it. But by the time they found the dog, the virus had already infected a new host – Jessica. That’s why they need her captured. As a healthy carrier, she could be the key to a cure. However, Jessica is unaware of spreading the virus. She believes she’s on the run for murder after escaping a facility where they locked her up. AdienGen Technologies, desperate to contain the outbreak and hide their mistake, wants to capture Jessica and keep everything discreet.

Written and directed by American filmmaker John Rosman in his directorial debut, NEW LIFE shows promising talent in screenwriting and its ability to build an ambiguous atmosphere in a considerably low-budget thriller that propels into horror.

I really like the first 20 minutes of the film. The tension builds gradually without giving any information to the audience as we watch an unnamed young woman run away from something. This ambiguity keeps us intrigued to see how the story will unfold, as we can only assume she must have done something wrong, but we can’t be sure what it is.

However, as the narrative progresses, we’re introduced to another character, Elsa, who suffers from ALS. This is a considerably interesting point, as we rarely see this kind of representation in the genre. However, it creates a complexity in our perception of her. Should we root for her to capture Jessica? Should we sympathize with her struggle with her illness? The film throws a lot at us at once.

Personally, I dislike flashbacks used to obscure information from the audience. For instance, in the trailer, it’s revealed that Jessica doesn’t know she’s a carrier of a deadly virus; she believes she’s hunted for murder. But viewers who haven’t seen the trailer, like myself, can only speculate. We might suspect she carries a contagious virus based on being captured by hazmat-suited figures. However, the film deliberately withholds this crucial detail until the second half, which strains believability. How could Jessica not deduce the situation from being captured in a hazmat suit? This is beyond my comprehension.

The limitations of the low budget become apparent in the second half of the film when the full scope of the situation is revealed. It strains credulity that such a deadly, large-scale virus wouldn’t prompt the deployment of a whole mercenary army, instead of just one expendable fixer hired to capture the carrier. Despite an intriguing premise, the film ultimately fails to leave a lasting impression.

NEW LIFE premiered at Fantasia Festival on 8 August 2023. The film received a limited theatrical release in the United States on 3 May 2024.