Review of Contracted (2013) by Pamela D — 16 Mar 2014

CONTRACTED (2013) independent.

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Eric England.

FEATURING: Najarra Townsend, Caroline Williams, Alice Macdonald, Katie Stegeman, Matt Mercer, Charley Koontz, Simon Barrett, Ruben Pla.

GENRE: HORROR.

TAGS: drama, sci-fi, cannibalism, rape.

RATING: 6 PINTS OF BLOOD.

PLOT:A young woman's already strained relationships are stressed to the max as recombinant DNA changes her into a monster.

COMMENTS: With credits such as Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear (2013), Madison County (2011), and Roadside (2013), filmmaker Eric England is fast establishing himself as a credible horror writer/director. Contracted is his latest effort and it's fresh, saucy, and provocative. Contracted will appeal to fans of films about troubled femme loners, such as May (2002), Alyce Kills (2011), and Neighbor (2009), as well as to aficionados of gruesome bodily transfiguration flicks such as The Fly (1986), and the 2002 French shocker, Dans ma peau.

In this stylish but unpretentious, straightforward horror thriller, Najarra Townsend plays Samantha, a troubled young woman with a sketchy past and an uncertain future. Sam has a thankless waitressing gig in a pretentious restaurant, and is trying to win a scholarship to a trade school. Her goals are complicated by personal strife.

Sam's girlfriend Nikki (Katie Stegeman) is dumping her, she has a tenuous home relationship with her mother (Caroline Williams), and an uneasy alliance with her acquaintances, who are more interested in using Sam than seeing her as a person. Worse, Samantha is a recovering drug addict, so when her life goes awry, those around her assume she's merely relapsed.

And boy do things go awry. After a controversial sexual encounter with a shadowy necrophiliac embalmer who drugs her at a party (David Gomez), Sam's body begins undergoing really weird changes. Bad weird.

Sam's malady starts with some nasty personal bleeding and progresses to uniquely alien changes in her irises. Sam begins a grotesque metamorphosis that smacks of recombinant DNA not of this Earth! Sam needs serious professional help, but it eludes her. She's unwilling to confess the dreadfully personal nature of her symptoms and their origin.

Sam receives little support from those nearest to her. They're all so self-engaged in their own insular scenes, that they view Sam as being someone to use or react to, rather than being someone to engage. Even Sam reacts rather than acts.

Like Sam herself, everyone around her is in a state of denial fueled by their own superficiality. Denial is a sub-theme of Contracted. Sam cringes from medical intervention, even though its unpleasantness pales in comparison to her symptoms. Disguising her disease under makeup and sunglasses, determined to lead a normal life despite her infirmity, she ignores her terrible transformation in favor of priorities centered around her job, failing relationships, and her desire to maintain her trendiness.

Sam's doctor, probably the most inept physician since the era of bodily humors, can't believe what's happening to Sam. Even the authorities realize something's up, but when they try to locate the subject who's spreading the disease, Sam's best friend Alice doesn't report Sam's encounter with him. Instead she rats Sam out to Sam's girlfriend, Nikki (Katie Stegeman) who's more disgusted with the fact that Sam had sex with a man, than she is alarmed by Sam's dreadfully degenerating condition. Even Sam's frustrated suitor (Chris Candy) is so anxious to have sex with her that Sam is able, with a bit of subterfuge, to keep him from noticing that her body is rotting. Throughout Sam's grisly decline, her naive mom just thinks Sam needs motivational intervention.

Nobody listens to Sam, and in fact, she doesn't offer to tell them much in the first place. It seems absurd, but given the glib narcissism of the characters involved, it's clear that everyone's vapid obsessions with the superficial elements of their lives take priority over Sam's living death. Self-absorbed, destitute of humanism, they're all in for a big surprise. Sam can only take so much, and the disease within her is squirming like a toad, and swelling up like a sun-drenched cherry tomato bursting with ripeness.

Or putrescence.

Sam is set to explode and when she does everyone had better get out of the way.