The Walking Dull
There are bad zombie movies, and then there are zombie movies so somber and self-serious that you find yourself rooting for the infection to spread — just to put everyone out of their misery. New Life, John Rosman’s 2023 “horror-thriller” (quotation marks doing a lot of heavy lifting here), falls squarely into the latter category.
It’s the kind of film that takes the shambling undead and somehow makes them boring. Imagine The Last of Us if all the action was replaced by long drives, whispered exposition, and people staring mournfully into the middle distance.
The apocalypse is coming, sure — but not fast enough to wake anyone up.
The Plot: The Fugitive Meets a Wet Nap
The film opens with Jessica (Hayley Erin), a young woman bleeding from her arm and sprinting through the Pacific Northwest like she’s late for a REI sale. She’s just escaped a containment facility and, in her panic, kills a guard. This should be a shocking, adrenaline-pumping setup. Instead, it plays like someone accidentally pressed “slow motion” on the entire movie.
Jessica believes she’s being hunted for murder, but the truth is worse: she’s infected with a mysterious virus, courtesy of a dog bite. (You know, the age-old “my puppy turned me into Patient Zero” plot twist.)
Meanwhile, we meet Elsa (Sonya Walger), a government “fixer” — because every thriller has to have one — who’s been diagnosed with ALS. Her job is to track down Jessica, but she’s also busy managing her illness, which mostly involves staring stoically at syringes and refusing to blink. Elsa’s boss tells her that Jessica’s carrying Ebola, but — surprise! — it’s actually some kind of experimental supervirus the pharmaceutical company accidentally cooked up between coffee breaks.
So we’ve got:
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One bleeding fugitive
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One dying mercenary
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One evil corporation
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And exactly zero suspense.
The infection is spreading, but the tension never does.
The Zombies: Now with 80% Less Excitement
You’d think a zombie movie might, at some point, feature zombies. You know — shambling corpses, blood-curdling screams, the occasional overacted headshot. But New Life treats the undead like background extras at a wake.
Jessica runs into a few infected people — a kindly farmer couple and a bartender named Molly — but their transformations are so understated you half expect a chyron to appear reading “Insert Horror Here.” The elderly couple go full zombie in the least threatening way possible. They look like they’re about to ask to see your Costco card before Elsa reluctantly shoots them.
Even the kills feel like the film is apologizing for having to include them. No splatter, no screams, just muffled gunfire and the emotional resonance of a light cough.
The Tone: Grim, Gritty, and Glacial
Let’s get this out of the way: New Life really wants to be taken seriously. Like, really wants to. It’s one of those films where everyone whispers like they’re afraid to disturb the screenplay’s fragile ego. The camera lingers on foggy forests, peeling paint, and empty highways as if to scream, “Look! Symbolism!”
Every scene is drenched in melancholy. Even the color palette looks like it’s dying of ennui — grays, blues, and the occasional brown to remind you life is pain.
The soundtrack? Sparse piano notes that sound like a therapy session for depressed ghosts. The pacing? Let’s just say the virus spreads faster than the plot.
The Characters: Misery With Legs
Hayley Erin as Jessica gives us the kind of performance you’d expect from someone who was told “be terrified” and responded, “What if I just look a little tired instead?” She spends most of the movie wandering through forests, touching tree bark, and crying photogenically.
Sonya Walger, to her credit, tries to give Elsa some gravitas. She’s a dying woman hunting a dying girl in a dying world — poetic, right? Except it mostly plays like she’s trying to remember where she left her car keys while holding a gun.
By the time the two women finally meet, you’re expecting fireworks. Instead, you get two people politely agreeing that life is meaningless before one shoots the other. It’s less climactic showdown and more awkward HR meeting.
The Message: Life is Short, But This Movie Feels Long
You can almost feel John Rosman straining to elevate the genre — to make New Life “about” something. It flirts with themes of mortality, corporate evil, disability, and redemption, but none of them actually go anywhere. It’s like watching someone juggle deep thoughts and drop every single one.
There’s a metaphor in here somewhere — about contagion and compassion, about what it means to fight when you’re doomed. But the film delivers it with all the emotional impact of a wet tissue. Every time it hints at profundity, it immediately cuts to another long shot of a highway.
It wants to say something important about humanity. Unfortunately, what it mostly says is, “We spent all the budget on drone footage.”
The Pacing: The Real Virus is Ennui
If you thought The Walking Dead was too fast-paced, congratulations — New Life is here for you.
The middle hour is a marathon of monotony: Jessica hitchhikes, Elsa drives, the camera films trees. Sometimes, to shake things up, someone coughs.
There are no scares, no urgency, and barely any stakes. Everyone moves like they’re trudging through molasses while contemplating death — which, ironically, might make them perfect zombies after all.
When the infection finally hits full throttle, it’s over before it starts. There’s no outbreak panic, no city collapsing, no desperate struggle. Just a few sad people in rural Oregon shooting each other and sighing about it.
The Ending: Apocalypse, Sponsored by NyQuil
The finale sees Jessica finally turning into a zombie, and Elsa — our weary protagonist — putting her down like a sick dog. Then Elsa goes home, redecorates for accessibility, and her caretaker starts coughing ominously.
Roll credits.
That’s it. That’s the ending.
No explosive outbreak, no final twist, no emotional catharsis. Just a quiet montage of existential resignation. It’s as if The Road and Contagion had a baby, and that baby immediately took a nap.
Even the virus seems to have given up halfway through.
The Real Horror: A Movie Allergic to Fun
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with slow-burn horror. But there’s a fine line between “slow-burn” and “just kind of dead inside,” and New Life sprints across it like an arthritic turtle.
The film is so determined to avoid being a “typical zombie movie” that it forgets to be any kind of movie. It’s not scary, thrilling, or emotionally gripping. It’s like The Blair Witch Project if the witch just politely emailed her victims existential dread.
You keep waiting for something — anything — to happen. And when it finally does, it’s usually off-screen.
Final Diagnosis: Terminally Pretentious
New Life wants to be an elegy for the apocalypse — an art-house meditation on mortality set against the backdrop of infection. Instead, it’s a two-hour PSA on why you should never skip caffeine before a zombie chase.
There’s a compelling idea buried somewhere in here — the intersection of disease, ethics, and survival — but it’s buried so deep under melancholy and fog that even the undead couldn’t claw it out.
Sonya Walger gives a performance that deserves a better script. Hayley Erin runs, cries, and dies beautifully. Tony Amendola cashes his paycheck and probably got a nice lunch out of it.
But in the end, New Life is less a horror film and more an accidental sleep aid.
Rating: 3/10 — The only thing contagious here is boredom. If this is the “new life” the title promises, I’ll take the old one back.
