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John Rosman’s effective debut intertwines the lives of a woman escaping a black-site facility and a woman hired to contain the outbreak

Amid the dumper-truck of post-Covid lockdown-inspired films, very few take disease and pandemics themselves as their central focus. So John Rosman’s stripped-back but effective debut is a sobering flashback to those incubative early days, its title punning its title punning on the microbe that asymptomatic protagonist Jessica (Hayley Erin) is carrying on her person, as well as her hopes for a fresh start, unharassed by government spooks, north of the Canadian border.

All we know at the start is that blood-splattered Jessica has just escaped imprisonment in some black-site facility. She bundles herself into a pickup heading north, which luckily belongs to kindly farmer Frank (Blaine Palmer), who sends her on her way with a new jacket and a rucksack full of tinned food. Rosman makes...

Stars: Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Tony Amendola, Jeb Berrier, Blaine Palmer, Betty Moyer, Ayanna Berkshire | Written and Directed by John Rosman

Since making its debut at last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, New Life has garnered a lot of attention for its first-time writer/director John Rosman and his potentially apocalyptic chase film. I missed it during its festival run, but on the eve of its American release, I got my chance to rectify that and see if it lived up to its hype.

It starts like a conventional thriller, with a bloodied woman slipping through the streets of what looks like a typical American suburb, trying to avoid being seen. She lets herself into her house and cleans herself up. She barely managed to wash and change before she sees armed men in her kitchen. She lets herself out a window and, since they apparently never learned about guarding a perimeter,...

Two years have gone by since we heard that Sonya Walger (For All Mankind) had signed on to star in the cat and mouse horror thriller New Life with Hayley Erin of Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, and Tony Amendola – who was in both the Conjuring Universe film Annabelle and the Conjuring Universe adjacent The Curse of La Llorona. It’s been seven months since JoBlo’s own Tyler Nichols got to check the movie out at the Fantasia film festival, resulting in a 7/10 review you can read Here. But we only have one more month to wait until a wider audience is going to have the chance to see New Life. Brainstorm Media will be giving the film a VOD and limited theatrical release on May 3rd, and in anticipation of that release a full trailer has arrived online. You can watch it in the embed above.

This film...

Nearly a year and a half has passed since we heard that Sonya Walger (For All Mankind) had signed on to star in the cat and mouse horror thriller New Life with Hayley Erin of Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, and Tony Amendola – who was in both the Conjuring Universe film Annabelle and the Conjuring Universe adjacent The Curse of La Llorona. New Life recently made its premiere at the Fantasia film festival, where our own Tyler Nichols got to check it out, resulting in a 7/10 review you can read Here. We included the teaser trailer in that review, but just in case you overlooked it, this seemed like a good time to put a spotlight on it, since New Life is now set to screen at FrightFest in London in just a week and a half, on Friday, August 25th.

This film marks the feature debut of writer/director John Rosman.