John Rosman’s feature-length debut starts off as a thriller: Jessica, a young woman, is on the run after a traumatic experience. She manages to evade the agent who’s been sent to her home and is soon headed towards the Canadian border. But the search for her has begun and is headed by reluctant FBI veteran Elsa, as her doggedness on the job is legendary. Elsa is actually preparing to quit her job and her life since she’s been diagnosed with the nerve disease ALS and has less and less control over her body. She hides her condition as best she can from her boss Raymond, and he, in turn, doesn’t tell her why it’s so important that she finds Jessica before she escapes the country. Initially, the young woman is lucky and keeps meeting nice, helpful people who understand her wish to lay low and start a new life, but at some point she won’t be able to hide from the surveillance arsenal that Elsa has at her disposal. At the moment when Jessica’s background is revealed, the film swings in the pure horror direction. She finds out very late that every person who helped her has died horribly and her pursuer is even more doubtful about her own mission with this new knowledge. But Raymond chose her for a reason. The way the two storylines are ultimately connected and resolved seems a bit rushed, but even if NEW LIFE doesn’t seem to really know what it actually wants to say, the film depicts new approaches to several current hotly debated topics disguised as a suspenseful and bloody genre film.

Christian Klose

Translation: Elinor Lewy