Contracted is the first of two movies about a woman who contracts the zombie virus, but doesn’t understand what is going on. [Read in an elderly lady voice] The problem with young directors today is that they take their body horror cues from Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, not David Cronenberg’s early oeuvre, and they have little to no understanding of how living with a vagina really works.
In TMI news, there is a scene where she goes to the bathroom and instead of looking between her legs to see how her period is going, she gets up and turns around without being shown to pull up her panties and pants. If you really thought that you were bleeding a ton, you wouldn’t do that because you would be spilling everywhere. Also without wiping, she gets up fully clothed and turns around. She would not say that her period is acting up. She would say that she was bleeding gallons because it looked like a crime scene. Also you can’t clean up that much blood in a sink with water and hands. You need a gritty cleanser and something to scrub. The way that her body reacts to this infection is anything but normal so as people are talking to her as if she is normal, it is impossible to suspend disbelief and take the premise seriously. While I applaud her makeup skills, I think that you would have to have cinematic levels of skill to cover that decay up. Shout out to the one black guy who notices that something is wrong with her. That scene was actually fairly sad because it was the only thing that the protagonist was proud of and had going for her, and it reflected what was happening to her.
Contracted works better as a revenge movie for victims of sexual harassment instead of emphasizing the STD aspect, her sexual/relationship confusion or as a metaphor for the destructive nature of drug use, which seemed like a grab bag of issues tacked on to the storyline. Keep it simple. The protagonist is annoying, but considering that awful people surround her, I would be cagey too. From the opening of Contracted, she has to walk a gauntlet of men and women trying to get her attention and basically projecting their agenda on her. Even though she clearly hates the attention, she is not mature enough to realize that she can say, “Fuck this shit. I’m out,” and gets manipulated into increasingly uncomfortable scenarios. It was sadly believable that neither she nor her friends correctly characterized what happened to her at the party. Aziz Ansari, anyone?
The nicest person is her fellow waitress, who deserves a medal for being willing to switch stations, cover her shift, sincerely be concerned and not annoyed by her mood swings. It is unclear if her later guile is a normal characteristic or a result of the infection wanting to privately thrive. She is rapidly decaying in front of people, and I know that meth can have that effect, but that quickly? No. When people kept interrupting her as she was pleading to go to the doctor, particularly to say, “Hey girl,” I just thought that she looked as if she smelled nasty and quietly wondered how they could still be interested. Also shout out to Alice, one of her bad friends who at least has a fleeting moment of common sense that something serious is happening before she succumbs to the protagonist’s charms. The protagonist must have great pheromones because she looks like death and has a dreadful personality, but again if everyone who crossed my path actively wanted my attention and stopped me from doing what I wanted, I would be a little salty too.
I enjoy a good outbreak story and the zombie apocalypse is irresistible, but Contracted did not work for me. The story wanted to be too many things and felt like a guy wrote it. Skip it. I later found out that critics complained that it felt too similar to an earlier movie called Thanatomorphose, which I may check out, but does not appear to be available.