The Worm has Turned. Into your Sister.
By Christina Harlin, Your Fearless
Young Orphan
Viral (2016)
Directed by Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
The plague in Viral may not be ending the entire world – yet – but it has definitely
brought life to a stop in a small California town. Sisters Emma and Stacey
Drakeford, both in high school, have recently moved to town with their parents.
The story is that Dad was laid off from his teaching job at a college and now can
only find work in a high school (in fact he is now his Emma’s science teacher) and
Mom is busy on her road trips for work and they rarely see her. There is
something rather fishy about the whole thing, especially the way Mom and Stacey
(the older sister) are so standoffish and angry at Dad, and Emma senses problems
but no one tells her anything. As the baby of the family, she is “spared” details
whether she needs to be or not.
News stories of a parasitic infection are rampant, and many parts of the country
have already been forced to deal with this nasty bug. Emma’s bestie comes to
school coughing and ravenously hungry – her own mother having just returned
(sick) from a trip to San Francisco – and halfway through the day, the young
woman has a violent seizure and yaks up contagious blood. Uh-oh. Suddenly the
school is closed down for the day, the kids all sent home, there are helicopters and
CDC vehicles in the sky and on the ground, and the town is quarantined by some
rather pushy and unforgiving strangers in hazmat suits. Dad had just gone out of
town to retrieve Mom from the airport, and they are not permitted back into town
limits. Therefore, Emma and Stacey are on their own, and it’s only a couple days
before cell phone service dies, the power goes off, and there is an emergency
rations package on the doorstep. In the last phone call they get from the outside,
Dad says, “Stacey, you remember where I keep my gun? Load it and keep it on
you at all times.”
The target audience for Viral might seem to be young adults. First off, let’s just
discuss the movie’s poster, which is absurdly oversexualized (the tongue, sure, but
also take a good long look at nose), and it’s inaccurate, to boot. Trust me, there’s
nothing sexy about these plague victims.
Secondly, Emma and Stacey are both stunningly gorgeous young woman (played
well by actresses Sofia Black-D’Elia and Analeigh Tipton), and are both engaged
in romances. Emma (the good younger sister) has a romance that is tentative and
new, with the boy next door. Stacey (the rebellious, angry older sister) naturally
goes for a sex-based romance that is wild and forbidden with a tattooed drug-dealer
who cheats on her anyway. They proceed with this quarantine like most of the
other high schoolers whose parents were gone when the quarantine came down:
school’s out, and it’s time to party. Never mind that social contact is strongly not
recommended or that there is a military-enforced curfew in the works. These kids
do what kids do: they get together and party with tequila, the surgical masks
distributed by the CDC treated more like party favors than important headgear.
(Incidentally, kids, this is what probably leads to the majority of the town being
infected, as this party goes a
bit south when the parasites
show up, so observe the
lesson here!)
Kids these days, with their parasites and their loud music and
their CDC masks.
Despite this clear party-time
setup with the possibility of
it turning into a teen
slasher-film
only
with
parasites, the movie actually
stays fairly mature and
tense.
We mostly see
through Emma’s viewpoint,
and being the practical
sister, that’s the side of the story we get. She enlists the support of her new,
barely-been-kissed boyfriend Evan, whose own stepfather has already gone mad
with the parasite, letting him hide in her house and ride out the quarantine.
Everything becomes all the harder because Stacey caught the parasite (at the party!
Damn it, Stacey!) and only has a few days left. Not before she dies, oh no, but
before she turns.
Wait, it’s a zombie movie? Well yes and no. There are parasites in nature that are
able to affect their hosts’ behavior because it ensures their own survival by
transmission, and that is definitely the case here. The parasite may be small when
it enters the body, but it grows into a nice and long (and gross and horrible) worm
over time. The squeamish need to take note – there are plenty of ooky parasite
activities in this movie and I would recommend not trying to have snacks during.
At any rate, the parasites are creating the equivalent of zombies and now Emma
and Evan have this to deal with along with everything else. And poor Stacey,
nailed into the bedroom, begs Emma to feed her, then to help her, then to kill her
before something awful happens.
Emma, armed with her nerve of steel and her father’s science savvy, has other
ideas.
All right. Viral isn’t a great film and it’s not a horror movie to keep one awake at
night (though it might gross you out for a few days after). What it has going for it
are strong stars and a smart-yet-vulnerable heroine. I was pleasantly surprised
overall. I think the ending could have been better, because invariably when the
actual “story” runs out, there are still ten good minutes to fill with a rather needless
zombie chase through the streets of the nearly-deserted town. That’s a pretty
standard complaint of mine, and it didn’t ruin the movie for me so much as it just
lumped the film in with too many others of that ilk. Too bad, as the first two-thirds
of the movie do a fairly good job of distinguishing itself from the crowd.
This final comment is a SPOILER, though not of anything you couldn’t probably
guess. Anyway, you were warned. Something just seemed pretty odd to me at the
end of the film. Dad had let his daughters know that he was waiting at a small
grocery store outside of town where many had taken refuge. When the quarantine
is finally lifted, Emma finds a message there that basically says, “Went to stay with
your uncle in Seattle. If you’re still alive, come on up.” Well, that’s just super.
“Gee, thanks, Dad, you know, for waiting, or looking for us when the quarantine
was over, maybe trying to find out if we were still alive or not. Good to know that
you care.” Dad’s probably like, “What could possibly go wrong? I let them use
my gun!” Anyway, I thought Dad was a tool for doing that. Go and find out what
happened to your daughters, asshole.