REVIEW: ‘New Strains’ Is A Messy Quarantine Comedy

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a great toll on the world. The catastrophic loss of life, as well as the mental and social tolls, speaks for itself. Consuming art was the primary thing that kept a good majority of folks sane during lockdown times. What’s been less prevalent is great art made during and about the pandemic. New Strains, which is being released on the MEMORY video-on-demand platform, doesn’t quite buck this trend, but it gets strikingly close to capturing a bleak, surreal moment in time.

What immediately jumps out about New Strains is a haunting sense of style. Shot on an old Hi8 camcorder, the fuzzy digital photography reflects a sort of nostalgia that comes from watching old home movies. Here, it serves a dual purpose. One is evoking that nostalgia, of course, presenting the film as a snapshot in time. The other is recreating a sense of mental and emotional displacement. When lockdown started, for those of us who were lucky enough to be able to stay home, it felt like living in a bizarre alternate reality, cooped up watching, as the world around our bubble fell apart.

Filmmakers Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw seem acutely aware of the feeling they’re creating. After all, they lived it. Artemis Shaw found an old Hi8 family camcorder during quarantine in New York City. Watching over old family videos, Shaw and her partner Prashanth decided to utilize this trip down memory lane as an instrument to make something out of their isolation. Improvising, the pair shot for two hours a day over a few months, loosely constructing a narrative about a couple, Kallia (Artemis Shaw) and Ram (Prashanth Kamalakanthan), arriving in New York City for a vacation only for a virus to explode into a pandemic, causing them to quarantine in place.

The filmmaking duo draws on friends, including Cynthia Talmadge and Olivier Sherman, to fill out background roles. These could be a FaceTimed-in friend of Kallia, a voice on the news, or figures seen from the window. These brief glimpses of the world outside make New Strains feel even more isolating. At times, the isolation plays for comedy. The neurotic Ram cannot stop incessantly checking the news on the growing pandemic. At the same time, Kallia spends her days waltzing around, playing strange instruments, doing virtual workouts with her friends, and generally exacerbating tension with Ram. But is she doing anything overtly bad? Not at all, really. New Strains taps into the stir-crazy mindset that can take over in a quarantine situation.

Some moments are less funny. New Strains is a film full of impressions of quarantine life. Both characters begin to struggle with their mental health. Ram and Kallia’s relationship ends at one point, then ostensibly gets repaired, a cycle one can infer will go on in perpetuity. Ugly emotions surface, like Ram’s jealousy of Kallia’s old boyfriend.

Narratively, New Strains doesn’t entirely work as a traditional film. There’s not much of a structure to speak of. Sometimes this works to its detriment, sometimes it’s a feature rather than a bug. Critically, it leads to long stretches where not a whole lot goes on. Which is, to be fair, the feeling of quarantine. That said, there are a couple of missteps. The disease in the film is never named, although the audience is clued into its true nature. This reveal comes so late in the game and attempts to explain the leads’ actions. However, the audience knows what COVID is—the whole world does—so trying to build out a wonky lore last minute doesn’t do the project any favors.

It’s unclear why the pandemic isn’t explicitly or even just implied to be COVID-19. Perhaps out of concern for being too brash or on the nose? Ironically, it highlights an issue. Maybe it’s to avoid drawing attention to New Strains not really addressing the lives lost to the virus. Because of this decision, New Strains feels like a somewhat privileged look at the pandemic, considering it’s about people who are ostensibly safe inside.

That shouldn’t be what keeps people from seeing New Strains, as it’s an interesting work all the same. Although New Strains doesn’t come together as a strong narrative, Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan do an admirable job creating a de facto historical document in a fictional package. As an art piece, or perhaps a time capsule, the project succeeds. As a film, it barely rises to the occasion.

New Strains is available now on the MEMORY streaming platform.