You’re young, you’re high, you’re carefree, you’re tooling around in daddy’s best car … when a heavily bandaged and bleeding young woman jumps into your borrowed ride, unable to speak and in a state of panicked frenzy. What do you do? Teenager Romain (Milton Riche) panics right back at her, and so begins a fantastic exercise in tension and mood, with director David Moreau (Them) maintaining a strong sense of momentum even as the film skates by on the loosest of narratives.
This sense of momentum is aided by the choice to shoot the film in one take. Or rather, the appearance of one take; inevitably there are joins but, as with Hitchcock’s Rope, they are hidden as much as possible. It does not take too long to become apparent that some sort of viral outbreak is afoot, perhaps a relative of the virus that plagued humanity in 28 Days Later. We realise this a little ahead of Romain, however, which gives the film time for him to turn a house party into a super-spreader event.
