Radius (2017)

Radius arrives from Canada in 2017 with a premise a sommelier might call austere: a man wakes from a car crash, learns his name from a wallet, and discovers that every living thing within fifty feet of him drops dead. It is lean genre engineering, and it spends its runtime on suspense instead of sermons. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. It wants to watch a man walk through a field and count the bodies.

Directors Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard build the thing from two borrowed parts, the climactic reveal of Oldboy and an old Superman comic in which the hero cannot touch anyone without killing them. That lineage is honest, and the result is a thriller that trusts its audience enough to withhold. Charlotte Sullivan's Rose carries her own survival arc, a missing twin, a marriage in slow collapse, and a willingness to make cold calculations when a hostage standoff demands it. This amounts to a female presence of some substance. It does not amount to an argument about anything. The camera is not interested in making a point. It is interested in the radius.

What the film lacks is a thesis. There is no racial dynamic, no economic grievance, no environmental parable, no commentary on bodies or brains or history. The cosmic anomaly is a cosmic anomaly, not a stand-in for carbon emissions. The amnesia is a plot device, not a diagnosis. When the reveal lands and the amnesiac turns out to be something far worse than a victim, the film simply lets the floor drop. The last image is a man doing the arithmetic and choosing the only sum that works. Grim, efficient, entirely free of instruction. A rare vintage, in its way. Nothing to decant. Nothing to discuss. Just the bodies, and the radius.