At least two horror films of recent
vintage have focused intently on the subject of disease, and even specified the
vector for that disease: unprotected or
casual sex.
In particular, two movies -- Afflicted
(2014) and Contracted (2013) -- explore this topic, showcasing couplings
that end up spreading, respectively, vampirism and the zombie plague.
The sexual encounter in Afflicted,
however, is consensual, whereas the one in Contracted -- though described as “a one night stand” in the film’s promotional
materials -- certainly fits every definition of date rape that I’m familiar
with.
Nomenclature aside, Contracted, from
director Eric England is a really good-looking, well-acted horror film, and one
that deals intelligently with a lot of unsettling and difficult psychological
material.
In short, the film concerns a young
woman, Samantha (Najarra Townsend), who contracts a disease after being drugged
and raped at a party. She then spends
three harrowing days attempting to ignore and deny her condition, a herculean
effort that ends with her actually spreading the deadly disease further rather
than hindering it.
As a character piece about a woman who
has been treated criminally, and who must cope with a horrible personal situation,
Contracted
is largely compelling.
Yet the film also loses significant steam
in its third act because the physical, outward signs of Samantha’s disease are
so blatant -- and so repellant --
that there is no way in the world that her friends, employers, family, and so
forth wouldn’t drag her, kicking and screaming if necessary, to a hospital
emergency room.
Instead, these characters persistently
make selfish, dysfunctional demands on Samantha, even in the face of her
obvious bodily disintegration. One
opportunist, Riley (Matt Mercer), even attempts to have sexual intercourse with
Samantha, despite the fact that one of her eyes has turned a jaundiced yellow,
and she has developed a horrible gray rash on her mouth and jaw.
Samantha looks, literally, like the
walking dead.
No matter how horny Riley is, his
actions seem unlikely, especially in a youth culture that obsesses on fitness
and looks. No self(ie)-respecting millennial is going to make love to Samantha
in her compromised physical condition.
The sub-text in Contracted is, no doubt,
that a person in need or experiencing emotional difficulty, like Samantha,
often feels isolated, alone, exploited, and unheard. Indeed, she is constantly
victimized by those in her life who want to be with her sexually, and is seen by
such vultures as nothing more than an object of desire.
This is how the rapist, B.J. sees and
treats her. This is how Riley treats her. This is how another prospective lover
Alice (Alice McDonald) treats her as well.
And finally, this is how Samantha comes to treat others.
Yet, finally, Contracted parts so
resolutely with any sense of reality that identification with Samantha’s victimization
is sacrificed. Not even strangers to
Samantha react appropriately to her, given her corpse-like appearance.
Thus one begins to feel more and more
disconnected from the film’s narrative, no matter Contracted’s noble or
artistic intentions.
“I’m going through change. I need someone
that cares.”
In Contracted, Samantha, a lesbian, has
broken up with her girlfriend Nikki (Katie Stegeman), and decides to attend a
party thrown by her friend, Alice.
There, she encounters a stranger, B.J.
(Simon Barrett) who hands her a spiked drink.
B.J. takes the incapacitated (but still protesting…) Samantha back to
his car and rapes her there.
The next day, Samantha begins to exhibit
signs of illness. She receives a phone call from Alice, warning her that the
police are searching for B.J. and that anyone who knows anything about him
should file a report. Samantha ignores
this advice and contends instead with her deteriorating physical condition.
Samantha wakes up bleeding, suffers
auditory hallucinations while working at her job as a waitress, and finally
goes to see a doctor. He tells her that her heart rate is unusually slow and that
her ear canals are infected. But other than those symptoms -- and a severe
genital rash -- she seems to be okay.
But before long, Samantha starts
bleeding from the eyes, and her hair starts falling out in clumps.
Alienating her over-bearing mother
(Caroline Williams), Samantha looks for help anywhere and everywhere, but soon
finds herself acting violently…even murderously against the important people in
her life.
“She’s no longer interested in what our
kind has to offer.”
In some sense, Contracted is all about
Samantha’s sense of denial, and the way that it systematically destroys her
life. She contracts the equivalent of
the world’s-worst-STD and then spends three days trying to ignore it because
she can’t accept what has happened to her.
And let’s face it, accepting the truth
is hard.
Samantha is a lesbian, and therefore not
interested in men, but she acquires an STD from non-consensual sex with a
man. Under normal circumstances, she would
have never been in the car with B.J. He tricked her and drugged her to get he
wanted.
But she’s the one paying the price…
Finally, rather than accepting how sick
she really is, Samantha lashes out at those around her, and becomes, like B.J.
himself, a person willing to hurt others for some dark personal purpose.
I won’t say that purpose is pleasure,
because I don’t think pleasure has anything to do with it, in either B.J.’s
case, or Samantha’s.
More aptly, after being date-raped and
infected, Samantha finds herself powerless and sick, and growing more powerless
and sick every moment.
She thus lashes out, and exerts her
power on both Alice and Riley. And her
only power at this juncture is the same power as B.J.’s: to infect the healthy.
Samantha is an intriguing character, a
fact which keeps Contracted from totally collapsing most of the time. She is a talented botanist whose future is
riding on her participation in an important contest, and we also learn that she
has attempted suicide more than once.
Samantha may be “weak” in the eyes of
the world, but she is also, essentially, blameless, at least at the beginning
of the film. She doesn’t deserve what happens to her, and furthermore, has no
control to stop it. Samantha is
victimized badly and perhaps it is understandable that she would at first
refuse to believe what is happening to her, and then strike out against those
that she blames.
.But the problem in Contracted is that
Samantha never avails herself of the information she could use to help herself
overcome her illness. The police have information about B.J. that might save
her life, but she never goes to them; never gets that information.
Worse, the movie repeatedly dangles that
information out there to viewers as a possibility, and never follows up on
it. At the beginning of the movie we see
B.J. having sex with a corpse, and that act spawns the “illness,”
purportedly. What else do the police
know about this guy?
The movie never tells us. It just lets
us know that B.J. is dangerous, and the police know it.
Also, I understand fully that Samantha
feels “shame” about being raped, but shame becomes secondary when you bleed out
into a restaurant toilet, or your hair falls out in big clumps during a shower.
Or when you pull your fingernails off,
and your teeth fall out.
The self-preservation instinct, it
seems, would kick in and over-ride the shame pathology, wouldn’t it?
Indeed, Contracted would be a
much better film if director England had pinpointed and utilized a good visual
technique to suggest that Samantha’s mind is compromised by the illness, and
that she is misperceiving both the people around her and the actions of the
people around her.
These characters all react un-realistically
to her physical illness – so blasé about a life and death matter -- that the
only reasonable explanation is that Samantha has lost her grip on reality. The illness has made her paranoid, perhaps.
There are even strangers featured in the
film -- customers at the restaurant where Sam is a waitress, for instance --
who don’t respond in disgust and horror to her behavior and appearance. And
unlike her exploitive friends, there is no reason for them not to pay attention. There is no reason for them not to react to
her.
Thus the only way the movie makes sense
is if we can be made to understand that the events are “filtered” through
Samantha’s (diseased) thoughts.
Similarly, Sam’s mom stages an
intervention with a stranger, and the first thing he should notice -- the very first thing -- is that Samantha is physically ill, not merely emotionally
weak or vulnerable.
I have seldom seen a movie in which
reactions to a character are as off-kilter as the reactions to Samantha are in
this film, and that fact works against Contracted’s success. Again, I understand fully that Samantha is
supposed to feel alone, vulnerable and victimized, but those feelings must be
achieved through legitimate means, not by altering the way the rest of the
universe responds to her.
If you or I saw Samantha bringing us
food and drink in a restaurant, I guarantee you, we wouldn’t touch the meal.
This flaw established, Contracted
is well-made, especially for what I assume is a very low-budget production. I
especially appreciate England’s choice to universally frame B.J. as a “blur” in
the compositions. We never get a good
solid look at the rapist, except as a flesh-colored shadow, and this fact adds
to his sinister nature.
The “blurred” appearance of B.J. also
suggests, on retrospect, that he may have been just as “sick” looking and
infected during the non-consensual sex as Samantha becomes late in the film,
but that she couldn’t detect his illness in her inebriated/drugged condition.
So Contracted is sharp and incredibly
disgusting, but in the end, there seems to be some diffidence about what the
filmmakers are attempting to say about Samantha and her life.
And the film’s conclusion, which seems
to set up a Dawn of the Dead-type scenario, doesn’t provide any clarity
about it either.
As an essay on personal disintegration,
denial, self-hatred, and shame, Contracted proves occasionally quite
powerful. But by the same token, the
film is so unrealistic that it seems something has gone badly amiss, or been
badly misjudged, during the creative process.
Just as Nikki helpfully informs a male
suitor for Samantha’s affections, the film isn’t quite working with “the right equipment” at times.
