Quarantine

I wasn’t expecting much from Quarantine, but damned if I wasn’t surprised. Taking a lesson from The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, Quarantine is a one-camera movie; the whole film is seen through the lens of a television camera. But where Cloverfield was amateurish and shaky, Quarantine is being filmed by a professional TV cameraman, so things are a little less rocky.

Based on the Spanish horror film REC, Quarantine opens with an eager TV journalist (Jennifer Carpenter) doing a story on LA firefighters. The squad gets a call to an apartment building and once inside, strange things start to happen. Soon enough, everyone in the complex is locked in by authorities on the outside. They are told that if they try to escape, they’ll be shot.

I don’t usually go for movies like this, but I was into this one the whole way. At only 80 minutes, I never felt stuffy or claustrophobic. The actors, Carpenter in particular, do a convincing job of trying to understand what is happening, (and no, it isn’t aliens).

Unfortunately, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen far too much. But if you want a fresh dose of a tired genre, Quarantine is all thrills. B+