New Life

This movie was on sale on iTunes for five dollars so I figured I would give it a chance. The trailer was good and within the first minute or so I turned it off since trailers tend to spoil the whole movie. I started watching it and was pleased throughout the entire movie. It was engaging and original. You can tell it isn't high budget movie but the production values are exceptional and the soundtrack was top notch. There is nothing that feels "low budget" about this film. I am not a film school snob. I have no knowledge on any of that stuff. I typically have an extreme distrust of reviews, especially critic reviews, since there's a huge disconnect between the rotten tomatoes website when it comes to audience scores and film critic scores. The audience scores usually are substantially lower than the critic scores, and vice versa. I don't wanna spoil anything about this movie but I assure you if you like dystopian style movies that have a creepy mysterious twist then you will thoroughly enjoy this movie. There's only a few scenes that have mild jump scares so this is not a horror movie in any sense of the term horror. Every actor in the movie did an exceptional job. I highly recommend. This is a 10/10 for limited budget movies and my scoring is just a general one that judges everything and I use the same criteria for all movies. So, my 7/10 is quite good. I would actually be happy to watch this movie again and plan on doing so with a friend. Please be kind, this is my first IMDb review and I was too lazy to spell check. Sorry not sorry. Best wishes with your quest to find a good movie to kill some time with! -Brandon.

I almost skipped this movie after reading the extremely negative reviews it got on here, certainly the ones stating I shouldn't trust the first ratings as most often those are biased, a thing I totally agree with. But a friend watched it and told me it wasn't that bad so I gave it a shot and I'm glad I did because it was entertaining. Maybe not the best in this genre but still worth a watch if you like that kind of stories. I sure do. Hayley Erin and Sonya Walger play the main characters and we're both convincing. Sure there are no Oscar winning performances, neither for the script that feels like a déjà-vu but it's just easy entertainment and sometimes that's just all that I need.

I had the opportunity to sit down and watch the 2023 movie "New Life" here in 2024, and of course I did so. Sure, I didn't even know what I was getting into here, aside from it being a horror or thriller that I hadn't even heard about. So writer and director John Rosman had every opportunity to impress and entertain me with this movie.

Oh boy, I wasn't exactly prepared for what writer John Rosman delivered here. The storyline in "New Life" was really a nice surprise, and I am very glad that I had the chance to sit down and watch this movie. It was a well-written script, narrative and storyline, and writer John Rosman really caught me off-guard here.

I genuinely enjoyed "New Life", but it sort of felt a bit incomplete. Perhaps a follow-up movie would bring more to the narrative, as "New Life" felt like it was only the beginning of something.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and they had some talented actors and actresses on the cast list. I wasn't familiar with the cast in the movie.

While "New Life" wasn't a movie that relied heavily on an abundance of special effects, I will say that the effects that were in the movie definitely helped bring the narrative to life, and also looked realistic.

While it might be somewhat of a niche movie, I think "New Life" is definitely a movie that is well-worth checking out, especially if you have an interest in both zombie movies and viral outbreak movies.

My rating of "New Life" lands on a six out of ten stars.

John Rosman's New Life tries to breathe exactly that into the zombie genre, and only somewhat succeeds. This is a film with some good atmosphere, scenery and genuinely disturbing special effects but it's consistently unclear in narrative, distracted by its own weird subplots and never quite grounds itself in anything wholly cohesive. A young girl (Hayley Erin) is on the run from the director (Tony Amendola) of a nefarious institute who has hired a mysterious fixer (Sonia Walger) to track her down and eliminate her. Why? Well I've already mentioned zombies earlier which isn't a secret the film really keeps too well from the outset, so there you go. The film is at its strongest when it focuses on the young girl evading her pursuers, seeking food and shelter from a kindly farmer and his wife, the simplicity of moving from place to place. When the story pivots back to the fixer is when it sort of loses momentum; Walger is a great actress whose work I love in LOST, but she's saddled with an odd arc here. Too much dialogue and a bizarre subplot about her early onset ALS do nothing for the story at large and just muddy things up. It also suffers from a jarringly abrupt ending and a general lack of focus.

New life was a bit of a mixed bag. It was not an awful film. But it was odd and felt like it ended out of no where with an ending that felt like it did not tie anything together. Hayley erin plays jessica. Though we dont find out her name till too late. Theres no context as to what happens to jessica before we meet her, shes coverd in blood and with a black eye and she runs, she looks frightened and runs. But shes not alone as elsa is hot on her trail and for good reason, jessica has something bad in her and it cant get out to everyone. They have a chase and it feels like not a lot else happens in the film. Good acting in this but the film itself let it down. Hayley erin made the film more believable and overall that was it really.