Incubation review
An isolated family regrets taking in an unexpected guest.
Festival reviews will not contian spoilers.
Incubation
Directed by Victor Fink and Joshua Land
Written by Victor Fink and Joshua Land
Starring Tanya Davis, Patrick Higgins, Alexandra Moore and Josh Rutgers
Incubation Review
The global pandemic gave us a slew of pandemic horror movies. Whether dealing directly with the quarantine or innovated out of the necessity of living through one…the period had its creative ups and downs. Incubation puts us back into quarantine…while some characters suspect that everything isn’t quite as it seems.
The setup in Incubation will feel familiar. It’s the one thing about the pandemic that makes it fertile ground for horror. We all went through it. It’s a shared trauma…or, at least, a shared memory of boredom. For the family in Incubation, it’s a way of life. The eldest child, Ethan (Patrick Higgins), is fed up with it. They live in the middle of nowhere…completely isolated from the outside world. Well, almost completely isolated. Ethan has a girlfriend who has been outside the invisible walls set up by his mother…and he knows that the world isn’t as dangerous as she makes it out to be.
The health of his little sister is the primary driving force behind their isolation. His mother claims that she is more susceptible to the virus and her life is at great risk if they make any contact with strangers. Ethan doubts this and hatches a plan to take her away. Before this plan can get into motion…the family’s world turns upside down again. A stranger arrives at their home looking for help…and, against everything she’s said, his mother lets him stay. It doesn’t take long for them to realize what a bad idea that was.
Incubation never says it’s about the pandemic we all went through, but it doesn’t really matter if it isn’t. It appears to work the same way. The stranger arrives fully masked…and I don’t mean with just a mouth covering. He’s decked out in a full gas mask. He agrees to the rules put in place for entry. Keep his mask on at all times. Stay away from the family. Get going once he’s been fed and rested. He’s not actually going to follow any of them.
Ethan repeatedly butts heads with his mother in the first act of Incubation. Once she lets the stranger in he has something new to worry about. Something feels off about the man from the start…and he doesn’t exactly hide that he doesn’t plan to follow the rules. Instead, he’s recruiting replacements for able bodies lost during the pandemic. What makes it interesting is that Ethan probably would have been open to the idea if this guy wasn’t so creepy about it. But Incubation has a different idea in mind. Paranoia eventually gives way to a home invasion style thriller. Then Incubation changes into something else during its climax.
It’s that climax that threatens to send Incubation off track. The first two acts are pretty tight and interesting. Bleak…sure…but engaging, nonetheless. The third act switch works fine…but the climax becomes such an extended ride that it borders on becoming a chore. The entire third act is a slow climax with slight twists and turns and a couple of interesting revelations. It just takes so long to get to those points. Danger turns into death…but those deaths feel almost quickly dismissed given how well Incubation does setting up the preceding dangers. There are some well done atmospheric moments here. Once they pop off into action…that action feels strangely dismissive. And the deaths are moved on from in a way that feels completely out of place.
It would be easy to say that Incubation feels like a tale of two movies. The first, a taught thriller with impending doom around every bleak corner. The second, an overlong series of climactic moments that overstays its welcome and feels less relevant than what came before would suggest they should. There’s plenty here to enjoy watching unfold…just be aware you might start looking at your watch before it finishes unfolding them all.
Scare Value
I was enjoying Incubation quite a bit through its first two acts. Even the first half of its final act still completely held my attention. The problem, for me anyway, is how long it took the movie to land its narrative plane. There are a lot of good ideas here and most of them are implemented quite well. It’s the final twenty minutes or so that just feel strangely out of sync. The pacing is too slow, and the big moments feel small at the same time. It’s an odd thing, really. The time is there to let those moments breathe…but they feel easily dismissed instead. And yet…the climax continues to drag on around them. The first two acts are worth watching to see if you find the third act more to your liking.
