User reviews

What starts out as a typical virus/paranoia film along the lines of OUTBREAK or CONTAGION suddenly drops everything about 20 minutes in to become a preachy politically-correct thriller about the dangers of blaming everything on a minority group. In this case it's Muslims trying to keep their head above water, while a lot of angry backwoods Australians (led by a skinhead internet influencer who reminds me of the late Tom Towles) chase them down with violent intentions. There's a subplot of a single dad who has to sneak his daughter out of the quarantine zone and becomes something of a viral star due to angrily ranting about losing his wife to the disease. The yokels hold him up as a sort of spokesman but he then seems to have second thoughts.

This film encompasses so many things I have come to loathe about the modern era of filmmaking: an over-the-top politically charged moral grandstanding, ridiculous nuance-free villains, flashy editing attempting to paper over story and budget deficiencies, and characters who make a series of dumb decisions for no reason other than to push the plot along. The main character, a Muslim detective who has to rescue her father from the quarantine zone, has the ability to move in and out of the quarantine zone easily despite not seeming to take any precautions and her superiors supposedly limiting her powers and then even going after her themselves. She seems to have magical superhuman powers to know how to evade authorities and find clues to who is and isn't on her side based on the flimsiest of pretexts.

It's all the more aggravating as the opening 5 minutes of the film seemed like the makings of a quality virus movie. It's too bad that it kinda forgot about the virus to blatantly focus on a less interesting narrative over minority justice and Islamophobia while presenting no solutions at all to the societal problems depicted. However, I do contend that's essentially what the events it likely got its inspiration from in 2020 did as well.