Dan's cow is obviously in a good deal of discomfort. The cow, being hugely pregnant, is giving signs that it's ready to drop its calf soon, but something just isn't right. Orla, the attending veterinarian, decides to delve into the poor cow to see what the problem might be. While she's elbow-deep, though, something inside the offending womb grabs ahold of her. When she manages to extricate her arm, she discovers that she's been bitten on the hand.
Billy O'Brien's queasy rural horror film Isolation has a lot of moments like that. Though set in current times, its sensibilities hearken back towards the 'bio-horror' movement of the late '70s and early '80s, right down to its radical-science premise: Dan (John Lynch) and Orla (Essie Davis) have both willingly accepted money from rogue geneticist John (Marcel Iures) in exchange for his being allowed to inject a couple of Dan's cows with a new form of growth hormone. It's all intended for the benefit of humanity, but these things, of course, never turn out well.
The problem, as it first appears, is that the fetuses are developing too fast, which would explain the unhappiness of the cow in the opening scene. Other problems eventually manifest, though, and while I wish to avoid giving away the whole gambit, the scenario recalls the early work of David Cronenberg cross-pollinated with Ridley Scott's Alien. If you know the sources from which this film draws, then you'll presume that the ick factor residing within this film's DNA is extraordinarily high. Your presumption would be correct. This may be the ickiest film I've seen in many a moon.
O'Brien lets you know where he's coming from right off the bat (not every film opens with a woman shoving her hand up a cow's vagina) and spends the majority of the film toying with the audience's sense of propriety. He exploits our discomfort and mistrust of unseen biological processes and the mystery of The Other, effectively building a horrific atmosphere where eerie things can and do happen. The "miracle of birth" is twisted into nightmare fodder here; there's an early scene involving the too-large calf that is supremely creepy, and the later stages of the film are heavy on the bovine innards (for related reasons). Among other things, Isolation will make you think twice about eating beef for a while.
Article comments