Carriers (2009)

Carriers arrived in 2009 carrying a virus, four survivors, and no interest whatsoever in telling anyone how to feel about it. The Pastor brothers, Àlex and David, shot it in 2006 and then watched Paramount Vantage shelve it until Chris Pine became a movie star. What they made is lean, cold, and indifferent to the audience's comfort. A pandemic has emptied the world, and the four young people driving toward a Texas beach respond by inventing rules, breaking them, and abandoning whoever slows the car down. Bobby gets infected and gets left on the roadside. Brian shoots two women for their gasoline. Danny kills his own brother because Brian asks him to. Nobody learns anything. Nobody delivers a speech about it.

This is the sort of material a later decade would have dressed up with meaning. The film declines. There is no corporate villain to indict, no inequity to expose, no healing circle in the final reel. The virus is a virus, and the cruelty it reveals is human and small and personal. The women in the cast exist to be infected, escorted, or shot, and the screenplay never pauses to consider that this might be a problem, because it is not considering anything except fuel levels and the next roadblock. The cast is uniformly white. The politics are absent. No thesis survives beyond the obvious one: frightened people are dangerous.

As a piece of classification, this is a null result, and I record it as such without pleasure. The critic's ledger wants categories. The film offers a broken-down sedan, a portable toilet, and Kiernan Shipka coughing in the back seat. It was received politely in 2009, at 62 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and rediscovered politely during a real pandemic, which is the closest it ever came to commentary. I have sat through a great deal of sermonizing this year and would like to report that the silence here was a relief. It was. Nothing to file.