Eric England's Contracted is a simple, effective horror/thriller that is more than happy playing for gross-out thrills, unfortunately missing the opportunity to deliver a more resonant message pertaining to societies' perceptions of beauty and sexuality. The film is centered around Samantha, a 20-something female, who is struggling to get her life together. Living at home with her mother and struggling to get over her recent break-up with her ex-girlfriend, Nikki, Samantha finds herself at her friend Alice's party, drinking away her problems. Samantha finds herself in an encounter with the mysterious BJ, who hands her a drink he claims she dropped. At this point Samantha is too drunk to realize what is going on, which leads to her having unprotected sex with BJ. The next day Samantha wakes up suffering from a terrible hangover, but as the days progress, Samantha begins to realize that her illness may be something far devious and dangerous than any hangover or STD. Contracted is another film in the 'body horror' subgenre that follows the slow deterioration of a woman who is dying from the inside out. For a main protagonist who is suffering a slow, grotesque fate, Samantha as a character isn't particularly likable, being a character that seems to blame everyone in her life for her failings, instead of herself. I believe this unlikable quality is by design, as if the filmmakers are commenting on the importance of inner beauty. Samantha is a beautiful woman, and the way she slowly falls apart in front of our eyes could be argued as a vague allegory about the importance of being a good, beautiful person inside. Samantha's inner ugliness, the way she treats her mother and friends who simply want to help, slowly manifests itself in her quickly deteriorating exterior appearance in Contracted, with the disease itself serving as the metaphor. Unfortunately, I may be giving the film a little too much credit, as this idea is exists but is half-baked and never fully developed, as I'd argue the filmmakers never went quite far enough to make Samantha unlikable enough as a character. They certainly could have made her likable instead, opting solely for body horror thrills, but with a character that teeters in between, Contracted lacks an overall purpose to it storytelling, as Samantha is not likable enough to root for, nor hated enough to pull off its metaphorical qualities. The film also seems to have something to say about men in its storytelling, with nearly every male character being an oppressive force, with BJ being the most obvious example of this, as Samantha's sexual orientation presents absolutely no barrier to BJ's forceful desire for sexual intimacy. Eric England's Contracted is a film that can be enjoyed as a simple, well-made body horror film, but it is unfortunate that the film's more interesting ideas centered around inner beauty and female sexuality are never fully developed enough.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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