Art is one of the key areas we turn to as we try to make sense of the unfathomable death toll of the still-ongoing epidemic that has irrevocably altered the world as we know it. It has the potential to provoke thought and discussion while also shedding light on the communal pain we are experiencing. Countless movies have attempted to address this issue, some more successfully than others. The horror film The Harbinger takes place in this context, attempting to symbolically utilise a haunting to depict the early days of the pandemic’s massive death and panic. The visual terror is effective at times, and there are some unique moments, but the writing ultimately detracts from the experience.
It’s a movie that’s led by its own whims, with no deeper wisdom or layered characters to hold onto. In the first scene, we see Mavis (Emily Davis), a disturbed woman, experiencing a nervous breakdown in the comfort of her Queens apartment. It’s not only the virus, though; something horrible is also appearing in her nightmares. When the building manager asks how she is doing, she answers she has no one to turn to. That’s because her loved ones are “on lockdown all the way in Seattle,” and they probably wouldn’t risk travelling to see her even if it were safe to do so. With nowhere else to turn, she reaches out to her old friend Monique (Gabby Beans) and invites her to move in with her. Because Mavis helped Monique through her own difficult time, the two had a history together. This information is conveyed through snippets of exposition, a common mode of discourse that poses problems the more it is relied upon as a crutch in a story.
For the time being, Monique clearly values spending time with her pal over everything else. Her family, who has been quarantined along with her, is confused and frustrated by this development. Her brother Ronald (Raymond Anthony Thomas) is particularly vocal about his displeasure with her because of a birthday meal for their father, who appears to be ill. By the end of the story, Monique’s bond with Mavis overshadows her ties to her own family. The video captures the apprehension and unease of those early days so well that it almost feels like a time capsule. When asked if they can take off their masks, both parties want reassurance from the other that they have been careful to avoid unnecessary exposure.
Monique makes fleeting eye contact with a toddler who is coughing as she initially enters the flat. Eventually, when his coughing gets stronger from the floor above, you could wonder whether she’s been exposed. Another neighbour of Monique’s has turned to COVID denial out of fear and anger, and the two of them have a brief verbal fight. All these pieces of information seem like they would add up to a compelling picture of the impact the epidemic had on two friends. However, the epidemic is only “the icing on the crap sundae” for Mavis, as she explains early on. Without giving too much away, the recurring nightmares are beginning to overtake her life and permanently shatter the peace she had previously known.
Mavis is worried that she won’t have much time to live. She thinks that Monique would be able to help her get through it, but we quickly learn that the nightmares themselves must be contagious. When they close their eyes at night, they start to picture the ominous ghost of a plague doctor, replete with an extended mask and robe, skulking around the flat. All of this has the makings of a terrifying tale that takes place entirely within the flat. Instead, it’s a chilly and dispassionate experience that falls short in every way it should. It’s very uncommon for dialogue to come out as clumsy and artificial when it focuses too heavily on exposition at the expense of developing the characters or setting. The audience isn’t given the impression that Mavis and Monique are close friends, despite the fact that they are.
The only real development of their connection is a throwaway sentence about a time when the tables were turned in the past. Their conversations lack nuance because they are mechanical and devoid of deeper feelings or connections. The storyline, rather, seems to be the driving force of the picture. The worst case is when the two decide to talk to a demonologist through Zoom. The dialogue they have frequently seems to go in circles as if the performers had recorded their respective parts of the talk in isolation from one another. This results in a situation that doesn’t move at a natural pace, however, this may be due to the forced nature of the language as well. All tension is lost when a character seeks clarification on a point, is corrected, and then tells something that says exactly what they already said. This is only one of many such scenes, and it gives us the information we need to keep the plot moving forward, without having any noticeable effect on the characters.
It’s a shame because the film had a few memorable sequences that were expertly put together.
The Harbinger features several effectively unsettling moments, and nightmares provide fantastic material for filmmakers to experiment with eerie visuals. One particularly memorable one involves a vehicle and a quiet person whose appearance will give you the creeps. You can see they are trying to make do on a limited budget, but that doesn’t diminish the effect. Inevitably, the film’s sloppy construction dilutes its impact, too. The scenes are often poorly choreographed, and the cuts come too soon, taking us out of the flow of the story at the most poignant moments. At one point, we suddenly glimpse Monique’s family, whom we had been seeing less and less of. The dialogue is cut short to a disjointed shot just when it appears like we might be heading someplace deeper with their connection.
The significance of what should be a pivotal character moment is diminished when it is accompanied by the jarring introduction of a generic soundtrack that doesn’t so much ascend smoothly as it awkwardly crashes into place. The moments of genuine terror and the interesting exchanges we do get to witness play out in The Harbinger suggest that the film is actually rather excellent. It’s merely trying to free itself from the shackles of the tale it finds itself in. This use of horror as a metaphor is perfectly acceptable, albeit the film never quite figures out how to express the depth of feeling associated with each of its scenes. The pandemic was and remains terrifying because of the perpetual fear that humanity may be wiped out. The more a movie delves into the abyss, the more devastating its exploration of this existential threat through allegory. Seemingly unable to figure out what may be lurking in those depths.
Is it about a household coping with a catastrophic event? An alliance formed on a common opposition to terror? A time of reckoning for sorrow and loss? The movie has brief moments where it tries to be all of these things, but it never finds anything new or interesting to say in any of those genres. Not that a movie has to have a message, but referencing a global epidemic should have more of an impact than it does here. Although the routines of Monique’s family as they strive to hold on in an uncertain time are initially devastating in their simplicity, they eventually fade into the background, and the film fails to establish any sort of emotional investment in them. When there is nothing to support it, even a talk concluding with a lot of gloomy pessimism falls flat.