{Movie Review} The Harbinger (2022)

The horror world has always reflected our cultural fears. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the horror of the Covid pandemic is all the rage lately. To put all my cards on the table, I don’t like it. Most of the Covid horror I’ve seen seems to be try and shoehorn in old tropes in the new frontiers of our collective pandemic isolation. As a result, most of it feels like What If It Was scream, but during the lockdown. It’s both too early and not fresh enough. A mostly toxic mix that does absolutely nothing for me. I say all this to acknowledge that The harbinger, directed by Andy Mitton, shouldn’t be my cup of tea. It’s set in the early days of the pandemic, when everyone feared what was to come, both with the disease and with the growing divide between people who believed in the science and those who didn’t. The harbinger is the first pandemic film to do well. From the color palette to the whole atmosphere of the film, The harbinger delivers on different levels. It’s the first movie to use the pandemic to create new horror, not just use the setting for cheap thrills.

Monique (Gabby Beans) bunkers down in the apartment she shares with her father and brother. The family is extra careful because Monique’s father seems to suffer from some kind of COPD or other illnesses that affect his breathing. The desperation portrayed by both Monique and her brother will feel very familiar to most of us who balanced our own well-being with the well-being of our aging parents. So when Monique visits a friend plagued by nightmares that keep her from waking up, she must reconcile the risk to her father with a desire to help her friend. As the nightmares intensify, Monique’s grip on reality weakens. The nightmares seem to be caused by a demon called The Harbinger, who not only kills his victims, but erases them from reality. “it is as if they never existed,” says the demonologist whom the two summon via zoom.

Beans is the star of this movie. Somehow she captures the duality we all felt during the lockdown. Can we take care of everyone around us while taking care of ourselves? As Monique’s backstory unfolds, we never see her as vulnerable but weathered. She is stronger because of her past trauma. Bean’s performance gives us that strength while she and her family remain vulnerable to malevolent forces. This idea that we could do everything right and still lose is a morale buster and again feels like a real emotion specific to the pandemic. It is her performance that transforms the film from a pedestrian pandemic movie into something bigger and more personal.

The film uses generous dream sequences to stir up fear, but also gives the film a scope that many other pandemic films fail to provide. From abandoned apartments to eerie woods, Mitton offers a range of haunting environments that manage to capture the vagaries of a dream while retaining the fear of a nightmare. For Mitton, our dreams are both an escape from the confines of our home and a reminder that everything else out there can be just as terrifying. While the demon lacks some of the flair of other films that have recently come out, it delivers enough on the monster front that when we get a full reveal at the end, it’s scary enough. The monster appears to be based at least in part on a plague mask that works with the film’s themes.

Mitton is at his best exploring how weird circumstances create weird relationships. From the unseen and underappreciated Yellowbrickroad to the fabulous adult fairy tale that is The Witch in the Window, Andy Mitton aims to scare us to help us see our relationships for what they are. Sometimes they are anchors that pull us down, but often these relationships anchor us to the world of the living, and if we lose them, we can lose ourselves in the process.

Monique has long suffered from a mental illness, and that struggle feels very real (as someone who struggled tremendously with these issues during lockdown, I get it). Some may find these discussions exciting, so go into them with your eyes wide open. Suicide is treated subtly in this film, but certainly plays a role. The characters struggling with it feel real, and their suicidal thoughts aren’t treated as a plot device, but rather as fully formed emotions that many of us struggle with. Are we enough for our family? Are we too selfish? How do we deal with our own limitations when we have to face them? Finally, what is our legacy, especially if nothing of time wears away our contributions?

The Harbinger is a beautiful and haunting film. A film that manages to capture the horror of the pandemic, while at the same time stating that the pandemic may well be the beginning of darker things for us and the country. It deserves all the accolades and you can watch it today on VOD.

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