Isolation (film)

"Isolation" is a 2005 Irish horror film directed and written by Billy O'Brien and produced by LionsGate Film Studios.

Plot

Isolation involves five experimentalists roaming in an isolated farmland in Ireland. When they arrive, they begin an experiment that goes horribly wrong and unleashes an unexpected mutation.

Dan Reilly, a farmer working in rural Ireland, is desperate to make ends meet. With bills that need paying and his financial status in crisis, he has very few options. He accepts an offer from a local bio-genetics firm owned by a scientist named John. The firm is engaged in experiments to find ways to increase agricultural production. Orla, the local vet, is a close friend of Dan's and also John's assistant. (There is a great deal of tension between Dan and Orla in the film, possibly because Orla is Dan's ex-wife/girlfriend. At one point in the film, she says: "I thought you could change, Dan..." before she leaves and Dan smashes a plate against the wall in fury).

The film begins with Orla arriving at Dan's farm. She prepares to give one of the two experimental pregnant cows an antenatal check up, but as she gives it a vaginal examination, she suddenly cries out in pain and withdraws her hand from inside the mother, to reveal a deep cut on the palm of her hand. Dan offers to help, but she says there was no need.

After she has left, Dan goes to investigate the car-drawn caravan in front of his gate. As he approaches, the door swings open to reveal a young dark-haired woman (possibly of Asian descent) and a young red-haired man. Dan asks them to leave, but they argue, saying that they're not bothering anyone and that they're not on his property. He orders them to be gone by the next day, much to their annoyance. Once Reilly has left, the young man, Jamie, suggests that they leave, but his girlfriend, Mary, tells him that "they" are probably already watching the roads, so they must stay put.

Orla returns later on, bringing John with her, who wants to check the mother himself. He uses an ultrasonic screen to check the position of the unborn calf from the outside while Orla uses her arm to check its position from the inside. On the radar screen, the audience can see a tiny flash, but it lasts less than a second and John fails to notice.

John explains that everything looks fine but Orla insists that the calf "nipped" her, although John simply thinks that muscle pressure from the cow may have split the skin. They decide to leave it at that, and return home, leaving Dan alone. He falls asleep in his armchair. Meanwhile, inside the caravan, Jamie keeps a watchful eye on their surroundings, to make sure "they" do not find them. Mary finally convinces him to come to bed. Dan is awoken in the middle of the night by a moan of pain from one of his cows. he goes to investigate and finds that one of the pregnant cows' waters have broken, and she is in labour. he tries to phone Orla, only to find that the phone company has cut off his connection, so he has no choice but to deliver the calf himself. He washes his hands and arms with hot water from a bucket. He manages to pull the calf's forelegs from the mother, and attaches them with strings to a crank but he soon realises that he cannot possibly deliver it by himself. Faced with no other option, he goes up to the caravan outside his gate. As Mary sees a torch outside, she leaps up in fear, thinking that "they" had found them, but when Jamie discovers that it's only the annoying farmer from earlier, he brandishes a crowbar at Dan, and tells him that they weren't going to leave. They are shocked when they see him covered in (cow) blood, and he explains his predicament. Gobsmacked, they do not reply, and he gives up and runs back. Mary convinces an uncaring Jamie to go and help him. Jamie arrives at the cow's pen and Dan tells him to hold the crank while he turns it. After a difficult struggle, they deliver the calf, but the newborn creature isn't breathing, so Dan quickly grabs the creature's back legs and swings the cow's legs around his head several times, accelerating its heartbeat. He lets the legs back down, and the cow starts breathing, much to the two men's relief. But Dan notices something is wrong, something must have been blocking the calf's windpipe. He pulls open its mouth and puts his hand inside, but the calf clamps its jaws down on his hand, causing him to cry out in pain; he manages to rip his hand free, but loses half of his middle finger. Stumbling into the farmhouse kitchen, Jamie helps Dan to disinfect what remains of his finger and bandage his hand. Mary, looking for Jamie, wanders into the pen containing the test calf. She finds the newborn cute, and strokes it. After a few seconds, Jamie comes in and pulls her away from it. Jamie advises Dan to kill the calf and put it out of its misery. But Dan explains that the vet will be in the next day to sort things out. As they leave, Dan says that they can stay as long as they want, and thanks him for his help. Orla arrives soon after, angry that Dan hadn't contacted her sooner. They go to see the calf, which had to be separated from its mother because it bites her. Orla pulls open its mouth and sees that its jaws are misshapen and filled with large prong-like fangs, which made it capable of biting through flesh. Orla tries to phone John, to try to convince him to terminate the project, but she fails to contact him. She decides to finish it kill the animal herself. She takes a gun-like weapon which is used to fire a shard of metal into the subject's brain, killing it instantly. However, as she puts it to the calf's head, the trigger first jams and then the gun goes off, piercing the top of the calf's skull. The mother, trying to protect its young, hoists itself over the barrier and falls to the ground, striking Orla in the head in the process. Dazed, Orla gets up and, before Dan can stop her, shoots the mother. Finally, the calf succumbs to its head injury and dies. Orla, still shaken, says that she needs to clarify a few things. They both carry the calf's body to John's laboratory, which is situated in Dan's large winter shed. Orla conducts an autopsy on the calf, and soon discovers that it suffered from LOS (Large Offspring Syndrome) which causes the organs to grow too large, which resulted in the calf's highly difficult birth. But she discovers something else: the calf had six odd womb-like organs, each one containing a foetus; the calf was pregnant. But the six unborn creatures were hideously malformed, their bone structure gone haywire, causing the skeleton to grow on the outside (they resemble maggots, curled into rings, covered in bone-like spikes). She and Dan are in shock. She tells him that these creatures couldn't possibly have lived... until one of them twitches - it's alive.

Orla tells Dan to lock the body away, due to a risk of "infection". She enrages Dan by refusing to elaborate, and she drives away without properly explaining the situation to him. Before Dan has the chance to move the body, one of the foetuses (which had twitched earlier) slowly crawls off the table and disappears. The next morning, Jamie offers to feed the cow, seeing how Dan is in no fit state to do so. He soon finds the second experimental mother cow, covered in strange scars. As he approaches, something swimming in the mud bites through his boot and causes him to cry out in pain. He stumbles out of the pen and leaves. Meanwhile Mary tends to Dan's wounded hand. She explains to him that she comes from a large family, and that "they" are in fact her three older brothers who have been searching for them since she'd run away with Jamie. They want to kill Jamie. Suddenly, a police car pulls up, and a police officer named Tom enters the gate. He asks Mary what they are doing on Dan's property and she lies that she is travelling with her father and sister. Although Dan tells Tom that it's no trouble, Tom orders them to leave as soon as possible. To remain hidden, Dan allows them to park their vehicle in his winter shed. Soon after, John returns to the farm to see the experiment. Despite being angry with the travellers being so close to the compound, he does not persist. Dan shows him the carcass of the dissected calf and John asks to be left alone.

He begins to examine the five remaining (dead) creatures. He takes a sample of the slime coating them and, under a microscope, discovers that the bacteria composing it multiplies faster than any other on the planet. Shocked, he returns to his previous recorded X-rays, and he finally notices the tiny flash on the screen from earlier. He zooms in, and sees that the flash was caused by the minute heartbeat of one of the foetuses. He then zooms in on its jaws, filled with hook-like fangs, opening and closing, alive, and wanting to get out.

Jamie and Mary, now hidden safely inside the shed,take some time to make their relationship more intimate, and have sex. Soon after, they fall asleep. During the night, the creature that escaped managed to burrow into their caravan and find its way into their bedsheets. Mary is awoken by the creature, and rips off the duvet, screaming in shock at the disgusting monstrosity (the creature resembles a short backbone-like snake, spikes protruding from its body, which is coated in slime and mud). They leap off the bed, and the beast crawls away under a pillow. Terrified and disgusted, they want to leave but John returns, and explains his findings. Inside the mother's womb, the calf became pregnant at the exact same time as the mother, growing for nine months, although five of its six offspring died. Worse still, the bacteria was in fact a highly dangerous virus, carried by the last surviving creature: the host. If it escaped the farm, it would infect cows all over the planet, causing them to give birth to thousands of host creatures, killing off humans, wiping out an entire generation. The only way to stop the virus from entering the outside world was by killing the host, but to do so, they would have to close off the farm, keep all of the humans and animals inside, and put every single living being into isolation.

They find Orla's scarf in the mother cow pen, and discover that she had also dissected the mother. They follow her tracks to around a large slurry pit, in which they believe the host may be hiding. At its deepest, the pit has a depth of around four or five feet, so the creature can only escape by coming past them. Dan has the idea of scaring the creature, and he fetches his old tractor, which he plows into the pit, trying to force the host out. Disaster strikes when the tractor's engine breaks down in the middle of the pit, and he is forced to wade through the muck, back to his companions. Halfway there, something catches his leg and he collapses into the filth, resurfacing with Orla's dead body. Mortified, he bursts into tears and sobs for her lost life. They carry Orla's body back to John's lab, where John cuts away her vest, revealing numerous sores and bites, followed by two gaping holes, one in her stomach, and one in her back. The creature had clung onto her clothes, slowly burrowing into her flesh and she stumbled and fell into the pit. Her body had grown cold, forcing the host to burrow through her back to escape, after eating most of her intestines. John finds a piece of bone/tooth lodged in her back, and he takes a sample of the slime covering it. The bacteria in it is identical to the sample taken earlier, and as a test, he extracts some of his own blood and adds it to the bacteria. The bacteria manipulates his cells, mutating them to adapt to their liking. He is horrified: the virus "can" infect humans. He turns to Jamie, who is now even more terrified. John asks him to show him the bite on his foot, but Jamie wants nothing to do with anything, and flees. John catches up with him and tries to hold him back, but he is overpowered and Jamie leaves once more. John grabs Orla's weapon from earlier, shouts: "you cannot leave!" and shoots Jamie in the head.

After comforting a grieving Dan, Mary goes looking for John and Jamie, and Dan follows suit. They find John crouched over a dead cow, dissecting it, trying to find where the host might be hiding. He tells them that the virus can infect humans, and it crawls inside other living creatures (such as cows) to eat away their insides and grow larger, like a parasite. John has already killed several cows, and he goes looking for the second experimental mother cow, only to find that she has already given birth, and her calf has escaped. Without a second thought, he kills the mother. Aa furious Dan seizes him, slamming him against the wall and yelling that he had killed his cows, his friend and his farm. He lets him go and turns away. John quickly reloads the weapon and, after a short struggle, shoots Dan in the head. He sees Mary, who runs away. He follows her, and she enters the milking plant part of the farm. She falls into the drainage pit, and finds Jamie's lifeless body. As John prepares to kill her too, the host leaps down from the ceiling and tears into his chest. (The host is now four or five feet long, covered in spines and has a large mouth filled with short teeth.) Mary runs for her life while John howls in agony. She bumps into Dan, who is still alive, because, although John fired the weapon into Dan's head, the brain was missed. They both wander back into the milking plant, where they find John's mangled body next to a hole in the stone floor where the host escaped once again. Dan, wanting to finish it, takes John's weapon and tries to climb into the hole, only to collapse from exhaustion caused by his wounded hand and the disease inside of him. Mary volunteers to go in his place, and he agrees, telling her to aim for its head. She enters the hole, following a series of dark tunnels, until she finds something at the end. the second experimental calf had also climbed down the drains to give birth. Mary finds it lying on the ground, its six tiny offspring writhing around it. Mary aims the weapon at the calf's head, and puts it out of its misery. She then uses the handle of the weapon to crush the six remaining "calves" to death. When she has killed them all, she hears an angry growling, and the fully grown host lunges at her from the side. She screams, crawling away, trying to escape but she comes to a dead end, and the host snaps at her, edging closer and closer. When she seems doomed, Dan suddenly turns on the milking machine, causing the room to roar into life. The host, surprised, leaves Mary and heads for the source of the noise. She re-emerges through the hole and finds Dan lying in the drainage pit. Above her. the host crawls through a series of pipes, and Dan swings a metal bar against the wall, causing more noise and yelling at the creature to come closer. The host leaps down to him and tries to tear at his flesh. He tries to fight back but the metal bar is knocked from his hand. He screams at her to run and save herself, but instead she grabs the bar, and shatters one of the water-filled tanks above the host. Water rains down on it, washing away its protective coat of slime and scaring it. It flees but Mary refuses to let it get away, and she strikes it as it tries to crawl across the ceiling. she finally manages to impale it and drags it into a mass of cogs and gears which tear through its flesh and crush its bones. It falls to the ground, where she beats it to death. With the host dead, she helps Dan back to her car, where she prepares to drive away. But Dan knows he is infected, and says: "no, stop...I can't leave the farm..." and he succumbs to his injuries and to the virus, and passes away. Mary leaves the car and wanders into the fresh snow, back to civilisation.

The film resumes in a hospital, four months later, where a pregnant Mary is having an antenatal check-up and ultrasonic scan. She is obviously carrying Jamie's child, and the doctor tells her that it is a perfectly healthy girl. As she sighs in relief, the screen zooms in on the ultrasonic screen and the audience can see a flash of the tiny heartbeat of a foetus within her child, something far more sinister.

(for a more simple explanation, Jamie was infected when they had sexual intercourse, so he passed it on to her without realising).

Cast

* Essie Davis as Orla
* Marcel Iures as John
* Crispin Letts as the Doctor
* John Lynch as Dan
* Ruth Negga as Mary
* Stanley Townsend as Garda Hourican
* Sean Harris as Jamie

Trivia

*The creature on the DVD cover behind the broken gate does not actually represent the host in the film, but instead one of the calves who carried it.

Festivals and Awards

"Isolation" was screened at Fantastic Fest in September 2006. It received three awards at the festival: the horror jury awards for best picture and best director Billy O'Brien, and the second-place audience award behind "Hatchet".

Notes

*The film was released direct to DVD on June 26, 2007.

External links

*
* [http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2007/11/26/isolation-2005 CFQ Review]