This isn't a great film, but it does have an interesting premise. Zombie movies almost invariably focus on what happens after zombies enter the world, not the creation of the plague itself, or if they do show patient zero it's just a quick glance as they transition. This movie follows the last days of Neil Parker, a nature photographer who is bitten by an insect and contracts an illness that turns him into the famous monster.
Neil likes to lose himself in his work, often disappearing without notice for weeks. After his most recent trip he returns to an angry girlfriend who ends their relationship. After one last night out with a friend for his bachelor party, Neil decides to head out into the wilderness to clear his head. The trip starts well enough, but as he's taking pictures of some insects he gets bitten by something, we're never shown exactly what, and gets a nasty wound on his arm.
At first he basically ignores it, but after several days the wound is shown to have gotten bigger and uglier, with inflamed skin and large pustules. Still, he only cleans the wound and bandages it, hoping that it will get better on its own. Around this time he also begins experiencing some delirium from the illness and develops a sudden craving for insects and animals. Eventually, those cravings turn into something darker, until finally he becomes something subhuman.
There are numerous graphic scenes of him succumbing to his new hunger, but what was really disturbing to me are the scenes of his dreams. At first they start as memories of happier times with his girlfriend, but gradually they begin to get disjointed and fragmented as the illness breaks down his human side. Anyone who has ever been severely ill will recognize the symptoms of fever dreams we sometimes get when sick or under severe stress, but the way it's depicted here is as a downward spiral with no end.
Essentially, it's a front row seat to Neil's slow death, with him gradually realizing that he is losing himself. His memories change from a comfort of happier times to a torment that haunts him even as he loses the awareness of who he once was. Frankly, it's disturbing.
So that's the part the movie gets right. Unfortunately, there is a lot it doesn't. The acting is often stiff and amateurish, with the actors almost seeming like they are just regular people that the producers asked if they wanted to be in a movie. And the cinematography is real B-movie grade stuff, with wide shots that serve no purpose except to keep the audience at arms distance instead of pulling us in, or terrible lighting that makes it hard to know exactly what's happening.
But the worst aspect of the movie by far is the directing. The pacing is so bad that it makes the movie almost unwatchable. The only way I could get through it was by skipping ahead several minutes at a time to avoid overly long scenes that took forever to get to anything interesting. Watching a ten minute scene of Neil just sitting in the shadows watching the people of the village have a party was excruciating. Nothing happens, just people walking around and talking, and there are several scenes like that. And they make the odd choice of having his first indiscretions happen off screen, only hinting at the events in brief flashbacks, but bring us along for numerous animal and insect feasts.
They also linger on his loved ones, who eventually begin to realize something is wrong because Neil has been gone so long, but bizarrely these plot lines are started but never finished. So much screen time is devoted to them calling one another and asking if anyone had seen him that finishing the movie without any of them ever finding him or figuring out what happened just makes you wonder why they bothered including them at all.
Better editing might have shaved 30 minutes or so from the film and made it a better watch, but in truth it had so many problems that I'm not sure. There's a kernel of a good idea in the story, but the execution of that idea is completely muddled by dead-end story lines, bad filming, and directionless directing. Which is too bad, because some of the stuff here is pretty emotionally loaded, like the scene of Neil sobbing after losing several days to his fever and picking up his camera to try and bring back some sense of who he used to be and the things he once loved. It's a heartbreaking scene of loss and fear that, in a better film, would be a real gut punch. Ah well. It's on Netflix if you feel like giving it a watch, though I wouldn't be married to the idea of watching the full movie.
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