As so often the first wave of glowing reviews seem to come from the production crew, and I let myself get suckered in.
New Life is admittedly a cut above the usual no budget horror in the woods fare, but it suffers from poor writing.
The general idea is solid. We see a woman on the run from shadowy agents. There are little moments that give us an understanding who she is. As she hastily gathers her belongings, we see images of her with her family, before agents enter and she has to make a quick exit.
Visual storytelling like this is neat.
The problems arise whenever there's exposition. Primarily this involves the secondary plot about the agent chasing her. The writer tried to be more clever than necessary my making the agent suffer from a crippling illness, but that plot never goes anywhere. It's one of many attempts at unearned emotional and thematic depth, that hinder the film.
I get it, the runtime is short, and they needed to fill their 90 minutes with more than just chase scenes and scenes of people dying. But it feels tacked on and never meshes with the main plot.
Remove the agent subplot and nonsense, and you're left with 30 minutes of tightly shot survival thriller / horror. They could have done something with that.
About halfway through the film switches gear from thriller to horror. There's nothing you haven't seen before. People in gross makeup screaming and charging at the protagonists while a generic (but still effective) pounding soundtrack plays. These scenes are reminiscent to the second half of 28 days later, but without the sense of urgency or John Murphy's emotional score.
The movie is well shot and most of the actors do the best they can with the material they're given.
