It’s clear by now that the pandemic has had a profound impact upon filmmaking – whether from a logistical point of view, or in terms of subject matter. Skeleton crews, deserted streets, plotlines about contagion…horror, more than other genres, has seen them all in the past couple of years. This is to be expected: as a genre, it’s long been adept at picking up current concerns and hurling them back, distorted, right at us. But arguably, this hasn’t been done as horribly literally as in The Harbinger (2022), which personifies the fears of illness and its attendants: loneliness and paranoia. Think The Babadook (2014) and even a dash of the Nightmare on Elm Street series; there’s a similar use of symbolism and sleep deprivation, of fighting against something which exploits human frailty.
When we meet Mavis (Emily Davis) she is already distressed and suffering, seemingly sleepwalking: building manager Jason (Jay Dunn) is able to pacify her when called to do so, but isolation has clearly got the better of her. This is at the height of the pandemic and lockdown, by the way: she hasn’t been outside in weeks, and as her family are all under lockdown too, they are in no position to assist her. So she calls an old friend instead, her former roommate Mo (Gabby Beans). Mo lives out in the ‘burbs but agrees to go to her, a decision which infuriates her family: they’re angry that she may get sick and bring something back with her, to a house with a clinically vulnerable father (her brother less than sensitively refers to NYC, where Mavis lives, as ‘ground zero’). But Mo promises to be careful, and heads into the city anyway.
Mavis is delighted and a little surprised to see her, but after the initial pleasure of a catch-up, she confides that her current state is not simply due to pandemic paranoia. She’s been having horrifying dreams – dreams which ‘break the rules’ and allow her to die in them before she’s back alive again, stuck in some kind of fugue state. There’s also a mysterious entity appearing to her, a being which gets closer each time – promising her that she’ll soon be gone. Not dead, but gone – not even a memory will be left.
Appalled by what she hears, but sympathetic to a woman she always promised she would support no matter what, Mo agrees to do everything she can to help: she promises to keep an eye on Mavis, firstly to try and let her sleep; she is obviously exhausted. Before long, though, and in a building which is by now really infiltrated by Covid, it seems that the strange dreams are also contagious. The two women, when they can extract themselves from their own individualised nightmares, try to work together to investigate the entity – which appears as a plague doctor, seemingly exploiting the current cultural preoccupation with disease, or at least showing a sense of showmanship.
Paranoia is incredibly well-used in this film, though perhaps most of all in the film’s first half, which steadily and insistently builds. The real and the unreal are linked via the motif of dreams, which operate here as highly effective distillations of fears old and new. Many people did report an upsurge in nightmares and bizarre dreams during the worst days of the pandemic, so it’s fitting that it’s given such a presence in The Harbinger. (Some of these particular dreams are bone-chilling; talk about picking away at a person’s deepest fears.) Running alongside all of this is the recognisable world of lockdown which, at the time of writing (let us sincerely hope), feels like a strange fever-dream of the past: the arguing about shared spaces, Zoom calls, stickers thanking key workers, talk of bubbles, quarantines and susceptibility. What a strange time it was. This is not just a fertile source for horror, but it feels important somehow to record this through horror: it acknowledges the pandemic’s unpleasant strangeness like nothing else can, plus there’s a possible sense of catharsis too. Maybe some of the Covid caution shown in the film is a little OTT – we’ll all have our own thoughts on that, largely dictated by our personal circumstances – but it’s important to remember that some did (and do) still behave in such a fierce, fearful way, particularly when the virus gets close. This is true of our characters.
The film’s weakest aspect is in the short-and-snappy ‘explication mode’ it enters around halfway through its runtime: this feels a little too convenient, a little brusque and largely unnecessary, because the symbolism works clearly enough to circumvent that tell-all segment. It also works well to keep the audience on the same level as Mo, never fully certain of where she is or if she is awake, or of what is happening. However, in its defence, the explication does allow the script to illuminate some finer details which may have been missed otherwise; this part of the plot recurs for another gut punch later, too.
Whilst some of the initial impetus and ratcheting scares unravel a little in the final half of the film, The Harbinger is nonetheless an effective and very ominous allegory. It’s successfully rooted in an extraordinary time and more, it’s permeated with the fear of simply disappearing – itself an extraordinarily, seemingly inescapable modern anxiety.
The Harbinger (2022) appeared as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival 2022 on 20th July.