Sisters Emma (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and Stacey (Analeigh Tipton) have recently arrived to California, they are the new girls in town and are trying to fit in at their new high school. Their teacher (Michael Kelly) teaches at the same high school — in fact, he’s Emma’s professor in one of her classes. As for the mother, she hasn’t still moved into town and will not do so for quite some time because of her husband’s affair with one of his students.
Sooner rather than later, Emma and Stacey are separated from their father as an apocalyptic biological pandemic starts to spread all over the world, and so their small town, like so many other places, is quarantined and placed under martial law. What follows is the girls’ struggle for survival as the infected people become zombie-like creatures and the military, as usual, worsen the whole situation.
The low-budget horror feature Viral is directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who also shot Paranormal Activity 3 (which is pretty good) and the recent Nerve, and was originally slated for a theatrical release in the US. Then, it became an “on demand” movie and was released on DVD outside the US. Which makes sense, considering it has quite a straight-to-DVD feel about it — mostly because of its schematic mise-en-scene and not-gripping-enough set pieces.
What doesn’t make much sense is that Viral opts not to go for genuinely scary or suspenseful moments while the gross out factor is very small. And it seems it’s voluntary. Though it is an R-rated movie, it mostly feels like a PG 13 release. It largely resorts to off-screen space to suggest, for the most part, the presence of the infected and the military, and yet the sound design fails to do the trick. So what kind of a horror movie is this?
Not an inventive one, that’s for sure. It’s obvious that Viral follows a well-trodden road and adds no novelties. So I guess you can think of it as a drama within with the frame of a horror movie, a drama that resorts to the genre to speak about how defenceless and vulnerable you can be when an unknown virus breaks out — especially if you have to trust the government. But this drama boasts a few sentimental scenes that are too sugar-coated and taken right out of a teenage romance.
As for the storyline related to the infection, as predictable as it may be, Viral holds some potential. Actually, during the first half of the movie — which is meant to introduce and develop the lead characters, but it unfortunately fails to do — the accumulation of minor events that lead to major mayhem is well articulated, there are a couple of scares, the acting is perfectly watchable, and the tone is kind of unsettling. But then, during the second half, the thrills are pretty much absent, the drama loses momentum, and chaos does look rather tepid.
On the plus side, as happens in George Romero’s zombie movies, Viral does draw a political scenario of a country where the rule is that the fittest will survive — but only them.
Production notes
Viral (US, 2016). Written by Barbara Marshall, Christopher Landon. Directed by Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman. With: Sofia Black-D’Elia, Analeigh Tipton, Travis Tope, Michael Kelly, Machine Gun Kelly. Cinematography: Magdalena Gorka. Running time: 85 minutes.Gaumont.
@pablsuarez
