‘New Strains’ review: Scenes from a marriage on lockdown

Though intriguing in concept, New Strains is missing real engagement from its married leads and a compelling visual style.

Married couple Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s first feature collaboration is New Strains. Playing a fictional married couple, Ram (Kamalakanthan) and Kallia (Shaw) are taking their first vacation in Manhattan at Kallia’s uncle’s place. Unfortunately, their trip coincides with a new pandemic outbreak, and the virus causes a mental decline which has adults reverting to childhood behavior. Will the virus put a strain on their marriage?

Couples therapy.

New Strains harkens to an Odd Couple feeling as Ram and Kallia could easily be categorized as Felix and Oscar, with Ram shutting down her playfulness to pretend he’s the adult. Though when he’s not stressing about hygiene, he’s working on becoming a rapper. Ram keeps obsessively disinfecting everything and Kallia is more relaxed in her childhood environment, often donning an old cheerleader uniform that still fits and playing a melodica. From his perspective, he is being responsible and trying to keep them alive, but an outsider could see him as controlling and resentful. Kallia sees his behavior as a continuum of his quotidian reaction to doing anything fun or being able to enjoy their time together without introducing conflict.

The underlying tension of New Strains is whether the couple are suffering from the pandemic or just hitting the wall of their marriage. But then the movie almost immediately cuts that tension by beginning with the couple on vacation after the pandemic started, with no earlier scenes to establish their normal dynamic. The usual adulthood milestones such as buying a home, having kids, earning enough money, and achieving career success are inaccessible today, thus making it harder for people to feel like adults. Without those markers, adults are less willing to jettison their childlike pastimes to strike a mature, somber pose, which may make the movie’s mysterious illness harder to diagnose, especially in these two. 

Ram won’t be your favorite player early in the proceedings when he simultaneously plays boss and helpless babe by asking for the location of the kitchen. It’s just a Manhattan apartment, not the mansion in Citizen Kane. Weaponized incompetence for $100, Alex. Also, he hypocritically brushes off his wife when she notices that he has the sniffles so a pandemic provides him with a plausible cover story to disguise his jealous motivations and abusive actions. He is insecure about returning to the home of her more affluent childhood exes which may invite comparison thus falling short and lacking. 

Kallia is at a turning point. Rooting for Ram means setting aside her own ambitions, outgoing nature and other relationships to maintain the façade of a supportive wife. Like many spouses in the pandemic, she’s finding her marriage too stifling and finds herself taking care of a man baby who has outsourced his emotional regulation and basic tasks to his wife. Emotional labor is not sexy, and her attraction to Ram is plunging. Having more time to talk to a friend and bumping into her ex-boyfriend reconnects her to needs independent from her husband. The pandemic catalyzes her sense of self and offers an escape from the adult realities of a life that does not go along to get along. If the virus strikes, she never has to make a difficult decision. It may level the playing field in a way that Ram needs for their marriage.

Irreconcilable differences.

If New Strains worked, viewers would be on the edge of their seat trying to discern how the pair would survive in this warped world. It never happens, and the possible impact only resonates when a random outside observer appears. Even by generous standards, it’s hard to get invested in the characters as individuals or the health of their marriage. Some may spend a disproportionate time wondering how they ever got together. In a phone call between Ram and his mother, deluded by genetics and motherly love, she clearly thinks that he’s the prize, and his wife is the problem. Kallia is a white woman, and Ram is a Southeast Asian American man, but it’s the only time their cultural differences are alluded to. It may contribute to Ram’s efforts to keep Kallia isolated and cooking at home instead of going-out cultural norms of how married life should look. 

Even people who hate Lena Dunham must give credit where credit is due. Dunham makes reliably entertaining mumblecore with often unlikable but absorbing, three-dimensional characters. Without their education and inherited privilege, Dunham’s characters would be poster children for adults who failed to launch along with the man living in his parents’ basement. Though taboo-breaking to some, bare breasts, extended toilet breaks, cunnilingus and mournful masturbation are not inherently interesting if the characters are not engaging, the visuals are not inviting, and the narrative lacks momentum. A movie can be so realistic that it functions as a soporific, and New Strains needed some aspect to be more polished and engage its audience. 

With a runtime of seventy-eight minutes, the cinema verité style meets analogue aesthetic, usually used in analog horror like The Blair Witch Project, does not work in such an intimate setting, especially where the income disparity of the couple and their surroundings needed to be visually enhanced. It may be low-lying fruit, but if you are shooting a film in Manhattan, make it look like the Big Apple. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but the camera format dulls each scene. The filmmaking duo create montages and linger on the uncle’s artwork to signify the wealth of the home, but the colors are not rich and fail to pop. The format enhances the feeling that if the virus itself is shooting New Strains while its central couple can’t escape its cozy four walls.

The bottom line.

New Strains is Sleeping with the Enemy meets The Stepford Wives without the technology, obvious abuse, or movie stars. Instead of a fastidious neat freak, the husband is a performative health protocol zealot. Neither the wife nor the viewer realizes the extent of the danger. The world ends not with a bang, but the pressing of an out of tuned piano key.

New Strains is now playing in select theaters video on demand. You can watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of MEMORY. You can read more reviews by Sarah G. Vincent here.