nixsight

If you listen to the internet, every other film uses lots of steadicam, and every other every other film is using the over-the-shoulder mock-documentary format to tell it’s story. And both of these things are, apparently, very bad.

Course, the internet is pretty much wrong about that. Though TV and movies have grown quite fond of the fast cut and slick cameras, it’s far from being used in everything, and the number of camera point-of-view movies is still pretty damn low – I can only think of three movies that fit the bill in the last ten years.

Still, even with so few examples of the style, a few cliches have started to come through.

The format naturally lends itself to certain things – the fact that having the film itself be the narrative voice that we experience the story through means that the film-makers can’t help but make the movie-reel a physical artifact of the story, and once they accept that, they can’t seem to resist taking the most obvious logical step to making the film the only survivor of story.

And of course, once that happens, it becomes impossible to make anything but a horror movie – though it’s arguable that “Cloverfield” is actually a sci-fi monster movie that is just played out as a survival horror movie.

Other than these two recurring structural/genre decisions, there are other memes that run through these movies. There are always moments of momentary camera malfunction; there are moments where the camera is left as a dumb observer – say, dropped on the floor or some-such – as an exchange or event happens. There’s a sequence where most of the action is obscured as the camera man struggles to get a vantage point. There are probably more – do tell me in the comments if you can think of any.

“Quarantine”, the US remake of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish language horror movie of 2007, fulfils all of these new/old conventions – though as a near shot-for-shot remake of the original, I guess if there’s blame to be aportioned for that, it has to go to the original.

Both movies – and let’s just take that as read from here on in, because as far as I can tell there’s only really one place that the two deviate narratively – follow a plucky, spunky neophyte TV reporter, and her cameraman, as they shadow the night-shift at the local fire station. The crew get called out to a disturbance at a down-at-heel old apartment building, only to find themselves trapped inside with the soon-panicking residents by uncommunicative authorities.

It soon becomes apparent that one of the residents is very ill indeed, and whatever is wrong with her has transformed her into a deadly psychopathic creature. What follows is a fairly by-the-numbers infection-horror, seen entirely through the news camera.

The film takes care to establish it’s stylistic credentials, with a slow-paced but likeable enough preamble – around a third of the ninety minute running time is spent setting up the eager if not-entirely-professional young woman’s reason for being with the firemen, and how mundane and ordinary an average night is with those guys. In fact, this is pretty much where the film and audience take the measure of each other – if you find the TV people and their subjects irritating at this point, you’re probably not going to get on with the movie.

The actors do a good job, though – if they’re irritating, it’s because the characters they are playing are irritating. Jennifer Carpenter – Dexter’s sister in “Dexter” – is the reporter, and she does a great job of making the character real. The other characters work pretty well, too, though there’s little in the way of development of relationships – things get too hectic once the stage is set.

This isn’t a tame movie – though the bodycount is restricted to the small cast, the filmmakers make full use of the environment – but it also has a peculiar coyness by comparison with many other horror movies. Peculiar, that is, because the subject matter and editing make for often intense viewing, despite the shy approach to murder money-shots.

The main problems with the film are ultimately ones that are encoded into the format – after a while, it starts to feel like the filmmakers are having to look harder and harder for ways to keep the camera in the room with the action. And because of what we’re already trained to expect when watching a film like this, there’s something inevitable about how it will all turn out, which means the pay-off has to be something exceptional.

Spoiler-warning – it isn’t. As with “Cloverfield” and “The Blair Witch Project”, the script opts for the easy route of ambiguity.

Still, the effects are nice, the setting freaky, the action intense – and as far as I can tell, not noticeably inferior to the original version. If you don’t get motion sickness from camera POV movies, it’s not a bad addition to such a tiny subset of the medium.