It was a matter of time when the coronavirus pandemic would enter horror, and the generic slasher scripted by Kevin Williamson (screenwriter of the original films Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer) and directed by John Hyams is, I think, the first such film I’ve come across. The virus has just arrived in America from China, quarantine begins, mass closures begin and people are advised to have as little social contact as possible. Already in the prologue, we see everything that we ourselves witnessed not so long ago. People wearing masks enter the store, they are careful not to get close to each other, and when someone accidentally coughs, they almost pull out their guns. There’s a shortage of toilet paper, people are obviously in complete panic and fear, and Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million) head into quarantine at a cottage by the lake.
Two teenage girls plan to spend time away from the world there until what at that moment seemed like a potential apocalypse passes, but they won’t even settle in properly yet, and will already realize that they are not alone there. And then “Sick” continues completely on the trail of “Scream” and similar films in which someone, for reasons unknown to them, set their sights on the young heroines and will not stop until they are blackened. Everything we will see in this generic horror, we have already seen countless times, and the only novelty here is the pandemic circumstances, the quarantine. We will understand by the end that the reason for the attack on two apparently well-to-do girls could be of a pandemic nature.
We will also understand that the prologue of the film in which a masked assailant jumps a young man in his home was not put there for nothing, and it must also be admitted that the horror scenes here are quite bloody and brutal. In the end, when the cause of these insane and savage attacks became known, it began to seem to me that “Sick” is partly a bizarre black comedy, partly satirizing that completely schizophrenic time. So we also have a hilarious scene where the killer attacks Parker and she gets to the car where the woman is, but she won’t let her in and take her to safety until she puts a mask on her face. From today’s perspective, it definitely looks ridiculous and absurd, but at the very beginning of the pandemic, when most people were in mortal fear and panic, I would not be surprised at all if such situations could actually happen.