VIRUS: 32 (2022 - Spanish)

Studio:     Shudder
Director:    Gustavo Hernandez Ibanez
Writer:     Juma Fodde Roma
Producer:  Sebastian Aloi, Ignacio Garcia Cucucovich
Stars:     Pilar Garcia, Daniel Hendler, Paula Silva

Review Score:

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Summary:

A viral outbreak transforms people into bloodthirsty rioters, but two survivors desperate to save their loved ones discover they have 32 seconds of calm following each violent rampage.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Javi catches his estranged wife Iris, a free spirit who now lives wildly, off-guard by giving her custody of their eight-year-old daughter Tata for the day. With no other options, Iris reluctantly takes Tata along on her overnight shift as a security guard at a disused athletic club.

Tata reminds Iris that today would have been the birthday of her little brother Nico, who died in an accidental drowning that Iris still blames herself for. Iris and Tata become separated in the large facility, but Iris uses security monitors to keep an eye on her daughter throughout the evening.

An unknown virus creates chaos throughout the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay by transforming residents into mindless, bloodthirsty rioters. Iris has to fight off infected people who break into the building and also has to remotely instruct Tata to lock herself in a safe room. By examining video footage of the violent attacks, Iris deduces that each rampage is followed by 32 seconds where the infected become calm and docile.

Iris meets Luis, who rescues Iris by showing her that infected people drown because they are supposedly unable to swim. Luis explains that he was on his way to the hospital after his pregnant wife Mimi went into labor, but their ambulance crashed outside the athletic club. Luis offers to help Iris find Tata in exchange for Iris helping him birth Mimi’s baby.

When Luis introduces his wife, Iris discovers she is infected. Although Mimi is restrained to a chair, Iris becomes reticent to help due to the threat Mimi poses. Luis reveals he already met Tata, but threatens that he won’t tell Iris where she is unless Iris helps him. Luis and Iris physically struggle, but Luis releases his hands from her throat when Iris concedes. Luis tells Iris about a boat that can take all of them to safety.

Iris finds Javi dying from an infected attack at the bottom of a drained pool. Javi mentions Nico, and tells Iris that the boy’s death was not her fault. Iris mourns Javi’s death.

Luis rallies Iris to help him fight through an infected horde as they escort Mimi to an unoccupied room. Under Luis’s direction, Iris helps give birth to a healthy boy named Raul. Afterward, Luis feeds Mimi a pigeon to calm her so she can hold the baby for 32 seconds. When the time expires, Mimi refuses to give up her grip on the child. Luis desperately pleads for his wife to realize what she is doing. But when it becomes clear that Mimi is about to crush Raul, Luis tearfully shoots Mimi in her head.

Luis tells Iris she can find Tata in the boiler room. When she arrives however, Iris finds a young girl’s body in the furnace. Believing her daughter to be dead, Iris prepares to shoot herself with Luis’s gun.

Iris suddenly follows clues that lead her to a safe room where Tata was hiding. After they reunite, Tata tells her mother about another man whose little girl was the one who burned. Tata also reveals that Luis helped her hide. Iris tells Tata about the plan to go out to sea and vows to keep her promise to always protect Tata from now on.

While shielding her daughter, Iris fights through more infected people. Iris regroups with Luis, but finds him dying from an infected attack. Luis tells Iris where to find his boat and asks her to look after his newborn son.

An infected man viciously beats Iris to the ground. In the calm that follows, Iris apologizes for failing Tata and implores her daughter to go on without her. Instead of running, Tata saves Iris by killing the infected man with a staple gun.

Iris and Tata escape to Luis’s boat. However, infected people who had drowned are seen coming back to life as pandemonium continues to consume the ravaged city.

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Review:

The day before screening “Virus: 32,” I watched the negligible Netflix “thriller,” their word not mine, “Choose or Die.” In that review (found here), I editorialized about how bizarre it is that Netflix consistently puts out terrific television series, yet their feature films, specifically the horror offerings, are just as consistently unremarkable, if not wholly disposable.

Now, I know some people make similar complaints about Shudder, although I think many of those moaners are wannabe edge-lords who consider anything without gratuitous gore or near-naked women being mutilated to be crap. But I’ll say this about a major difference between these two streamers when it comes to original genre features. Shudder’s midrange movies, I’m talking about the ones that aren’t poised to be big breakouts but are still respectable slices of indie entertainment, are infinitely better than the routine chunder Netflix churns out just to say, “Look at how much new, exclusive content we’ve shoveled onto our service!” Shudder doesn’t always have the big names or eye-catching enticements. But the pad around their middle is far healthier than the flabby potbelly growing over Netflix’s belt.

Shudder’s “Virus: 32” makes an excellent case study for what I mean. It’s not trendy, so you’re not going to hear it being buzzed about like it’s an uber-popular festival favorite. It’s in Spanish with English subtitles, so that narrows its niche even further. All it wants is a small spot on your list of Thursday night activities, it’s not looking to make a bigger impact, and that’s more than adequate for a cleanly crafted little spin around the block where undead apocalypses reside.

Iris anchors the story. She’s a deadbeat mom of sorts, though that has a little more to do with self-inflicted emotional pain than totally selfish negligence. She’s clearly going through something since she still seems to love her estranged husband, yet she’s living with a roommate who enables her carefree lifestyle of pink hair, shots of rum before work, and middle fingers pointed at security cameras.

These things also make Iris a “fun” mother, at least in her eyes. When she’s suddenly saddled with watching her eight-year-old daughter Tata for the night, Iris elects to make the best of an undesirable situation. She brings Tata along for her late shift as an old athletic club’s security guard, and does a bit of bonding by teaching curse words, encouraging occasional irresponsibility, and treating Tata like another flighty friend, even though what the girl wants is a reliable mother.

Iris has to face this fact when Tata reminds her today would have been her little brother’s birthday. In a curious coincidence, “Choose or Die” and “Virus: 32’s” heroines have the exact same tragedy hanging burdensome guilt over their heads: blaming themselves for a child’s drowning death. If you’ve seen how “Choose or Die” did next to nothing with that thread except torture its lead, watch how much more poignancy it has as a theme throughout “Virus: 32.”

Confronting parental failures becomes even more urgent when an unknown virus explodes throughout Uruguay, turning everyone who gets infected into a mindless madman determined to viciously destroy the progressively fewer survivors who are still human. They’re not zombies. They’re afflicted with a contagious illness that immediately inspires furious footraces, feral growling, and brutal violence. The only respite is that for 32 seconds after each savage attack, the infected inexplicably become completely calm.

As she fights to find Tata in the labyrinthine building after it’s invaded by infected, Tata teams up with Luis, who also wants little to do with being a parent. While on his way to the hospital with a pregnant wife in labor, chaos caused Luis to crash. Now he and Iris need each other’s help to take care of their loved ones while desperately clawing their way to safety.

That summary right there is what kicked “Virus: 32” up a significant notch for me. It’s a horror movie that’s actually “about” something. It’s about confronting loss by accepting accountability, and how it can sometimes take trauma to make a person proactive instead of reactive when it comes to fighting for a family previously believed to be inconvenient. This isn’t indistinguishable creatures running around, drooling red corn syrup out of their mouths while prop guns fire muzzle flashes. Being authentically meaningful is what makes “Virus: 32’s” action intriguing.

Momentum still gets stuck on several slow sections. Hide-and-seek stalking, which the film features too much of for its second act, isn’t all that suspenseful when you’re in the midst of a movie where frenzied maniacs are sprinting full tilt in streaks of slaughter.

“Virus: 32” continually gets itself back up to speed thanks in part to a Steadicam that keeps simple scene energy flowing freely without being distracting or overcompensating. The movie is made from a small cast in a single location, yet the production feels bigger than it is. There’s a requisite amount of substance to the setup and to the characters so the plot doesn’t feel shortchanged and the script doesn’t seem skimpy even though the 89-minute runtime breezes by. Director Gustavo Hernandez Ibanez also tries a few tricks to hide how compartmentalized certain sets and infected hordes are with smoke, silhouettes and other bits of clever staging to heighten atmosphere.

I consider “Virus: 32” to be a solid example of a three-star film, 3.5 for me personally, and that’s really all it needs to be. Getting back to what I was saying about mid-road movies on streaming services, I’d much rather have to be reminded of a movie I saw and then react with, “Oh, now I remember, yeah, that was pretty good” rather than fully forget a film, and that’s the difference between a “Virus: 32” and whatever is briefly blipping on Netflix this weekend. It’s a fine enough film that may not blow you away, but it won’t blow up your entire evening either. Netflix content strategists assigned to this lower-profile tier could learn quite a bit from the lessons “Virus: 32” teaches.

Review Score: 70

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