We join Kalia and Ram as they find themselves confined within the walls of an Upper West Side apartment, the sprawling city they’ve come to visit now on strict lockdown. The married filmmakers behind New Strains, Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, capture this claustrophobic setting perfectly, shooting within its rooms using only a decades-old camcorder.
Our leads had planned this Manhattan getaway as a carefree vacation. But as a mysterious illness sweeps the nation, they discover themselves trapped amid rising tensions. Kalia still hopes to make the most of their time together through playful games and cooking. Yet Ram can think only of disinfecting every surface, desperate to avoid what’s causing this citywide panic.
As the days drag on in isolation, tiny acts of disharmony multiply into full-blown fights. With no outlet beyond each other, their relationship begins to fray at the seams. Are they falling victim to simple lockdown confinement, or had deeper issues lain dormant, now brought to the surface?
Through it all, Shaw and Kamalakanthan maintain an intimate, fly-on-the-wall perspective. Their naturalistic, improvised style brings us deep inside this claustrophobic experience, though narrative momentum lags at times. Ultimately, New Strains offers an evocative time capsule of relationship tensions exacerbated under the duress of a pandemic.
Locked Down Together
We meet Kallia and Ram as they arrive at her uncle’s spacious Manhattan apartment, their journey interrupted by an unexpected lockdown. Right away, their differences come across.
Where Kallia aims to find lightness through games and cooking, Ram fusses endlessly over sanitation. With the city suddenly on pause, his anxieties peak. Each disinfectant wipe soothes fears of the unseen menace outside.
For Kallia, being cooped indoors is against her adventurous spirit. She yearns to enjoy their time together through outdoor rooftop workouts or strolls around the neighborhood. But Ram struggles seeing past infection dangers lurking everywhere she goes.
Their vacation plans now trapped within four walls, tensions begin simmering. Kallia bristles at Ram’s budding control as he polices her every movement. Meanwhile, his incessant cleaning grates on her carefree nature.
Differing perspectives on lockdown, shaped by their personalities, start unraveling the fabric of their relationship. His worries rub against her independence. She chafes under his restrictions like the city under lockdown’s strictures.
Were there cracks before this forced closeness exposed them? Having just begun their time together, lockdown accelerates what may have come to surface gradually. Now each day’s squabbles chip further at their foundation.
As pressures mount, darker sides also emerge. Impatience and accusations replace patience and understanding. Ram’s anxieties morph into possessive outbursts. Resentment grows where care and intimacy once dwell.
With no end in sight, will Kallia and Ram’s relationship survive being under one roof—and one another—day upon claustrophobic day? New Strains placed under lockdown’s lens reveal inner strains that may prove harder weathering than any virus.
A Lockdown Aesthetic
With restrictions forcing many projects to shelf, Artemis Shaw crafted New Strains under unique conditions. Necessity birthed invention as Shaw collaborated with husband Prashanth Kamalakanthan, shooting within their very setting and using materials close at hand.
Driving this raw, intimate style is a decades-old camera, lending each scene a lo-fi grittiness that bolsters authenticity. As we peer over their shoulders into cramped rooms, it feels like a voyeuristic window into private isolation. This seized device, discovered by chance, ties their film directly to lockdown experiences worldwide—a found art to match found time.
Dialogue proceeds nimbly between leads, developing organically from sparks of improvised moments. Shaw sketches just a backdrop, allowing interactions and tensions to deepen naturally within quarantine’s four walls. This yields performances carrying the ring of truth, though light on dramatic arch.
Providing mood and levity is Will Epstein’s quirky score, bubbly keyboards echoing the film’s cheeky heart. As leads descend into dark patches, his “Casio Hitchcock” tones bring levity, like raindrops softening parched earth. The soundtrack blossoms from a similar seed of resourcefulness, matching visuals in energizing constraints into art.
Together, lockdown’s limitations sculpted a style subtly amplifying this story’s authenticity. New Strains’ lo-fi aesthetic, verité spirit, and soundtrack buoy lightness even amid heavier themes—an intimacy reflecting the solace many found within creativity’s bounds.
Neither Sick Nor Sane
New Strains drops us into lockdown’s fraying realities. Yet for all its glimpses at pandemic tensions, a fuller depth remains absent.
Shaw captures the claustrophobia well—within days, even friends start feeling like foes. Ram and Kallia showcase spiraling hostilities as their relationship pays lockdown’s costs. His hygiene vigilantism versus her need for normalcy mirrors polarizing public debates.
But the mystery illness left lingering questions. What does it symbolize—ignorance, fear, loss of reason? While people act strange on TV, this MacGuffin feels underdeveloped. Without a stronger sense of diagnosis, it hardly transforms subtext into text.
Similarly, context is wanting. We see lockdown’s strain but learn little of its wider challenges—health, politics, society. By framing this mostly as an interpersonal drama, opportunities for richer commentary are missed.
To be fair, New Strains faced limitations of its own making. Imagination seized opportunity from restriction’s door. Still, for a story examining a phenomenon through a lens of “mental earthquake,” fulsome insight into its tremors feels lacking.
In the end, this is less a social critique unpacking pandemic truths, and more a snapshot of fraying relationships magnified under lockdown’s glass. Its successes remain the gritty intimacy granting peeks behind closed doors. But for viewers seeking a deeper understanding of life circa 2020, answers remain elusive, like contacts beyond the frame.
Perhaps in depicting one small story of individuals unmoored, limits were unavoidable. Yet with such a sprawling context available, one wishes New Strains cast its gaze further to better plumb lockdown’s ripples through community and creativity.
Neither Seeing Eye to Eye
As lockdown drags on, tensions wear Kallia and Ram’s relationship thin. Where early episodes found sparks of humor in their contrasts, darker shades soon overtake lightness.
Anxieties make Ram’s manner sour and possessive. Trivial spats escalate ugly fast, with resentments unleashed where care once stood. Ever the anxious germaphobe, his phobias spread contagious, infecting interactions with control and distrust.
Kallia’s adventurous spirit bucks harder at such smothering. Time amplifies how his ways rub against her independence. Space shrinks where understanding once gave room to breathe free.
With solace elsewhere blocked, no respite found within these four walls, the pair lash wounds deeper instead of soothing each other’s pain. Play dies where passion had life; in its place mounts a mounting lack.
As cracks widen, missed chances haunt to flesh their characters fuller. Flashes offer glimpses of hopes and hurt beneath the surface—yet we learn them too shallowly. More insights into what drew and now draws them apart could make their unraveling ring truer.
Meanwhile, the mystery illness lurking outside proves no match for the strains within. This tension promises most to hook us, yet delivers least in satisfying ways. Readers risk drifting when real fascination remains just out of sight.
New Strains depicts lockdown eroding what ties two. But in failing to make us truly care for this couple or crave resolving their mysteries, the narrative itself risks coming undone.
No Polish in a Pandemic
New Strains emerged amid unique constraints, and hints of ingenuity shine through rough edges. Shot solely on found camcorders within a single apartment, Shaw crafts flickers of intimacy from lockdown’s limitations.
Yet over lengthy scenes, grainy pictures, and improvised dialogue stretch thin. The magic fades, and flaws come more into focus—too many jarring pans distracting from natural flow.
Most tragic are settings left sans spark. Manhattan remains merely a backdrop, tones muted behind a technical murk. With such a tableau on offer, richer visuals could have lifted sparse interiors from bleakness.
More polishing may have guided this glimpsed story to a fuller flower. As it stands, New Strains illustrates both pandemic creativity and the heights to which greater polish could take such seeds. But lest we criticize from comfort, this film exists—a testament to one couple’s resilient artistry.
Under duress most flee, Shaw followed his imagination’s call. Her efforts resonate with struggles worldwide to transform survival into slices of living. And though rough, this snapshot preserves some flicker of life before a dark chapter’s closing.
Neither Home Video Nor Hollywood
Within New Strains lie glimpses of truth—fleeting moments capturing lockdown’s peculiar realities. Through gritty textures and impromptu dialogue, Shaw places us in a lived experience, bearing witness to strains within four walls.
Yet over lengthy scenes, storytelling stiffness sets in. Character depths go unplumbed, mysteries left teasingly vague. Without firmer hands shaping its sands, the narrative escapes its hold.
This may owe partly to lockdown constraints Shaw birthed art from. Strictures of form gave way to capturing the spirit of a strangulating time. In thriving under duress, her film stands as a document of defiance when all said surrender works.
But defiance alone ensures no entertainment. And as neither slick home movie nor slick Hollywood feature, New Strains finds itself an orphan at times of both trends. A stronger tightening of screws may have wrought sharper insights from its rough materials.
Even so, bravos are due for art arising when most envisioned only survival. In capturing ordinary lives stifled extraordinary, Shaw’s imperfect film deserves its place. A time capsule of pandemic private worlds, though room for polishing remains.
The Review
New Strains
New Strains offers an empathetic window into relationship tensions exacerbated by lockdown, yet its narrative and characters feel underdeveloped to fully engage viewers. While commendable for its resourceful production amid restrictions, Shaw's film falls into a creativemiddle ground, neither casual home movie nor refined theatrical feature.
PROS
- Authentic portrayal of stresses from prolonged quarantine
- Impressive, it was made under lockdown limitations.
- Gritty lo-fi aesthetic enhances intimate setting
CONS
- Characters and narrative lack depth over a short runtime.
- Fails to capitalize on larger social commentary potential
- Setting of Manhattan underutilized visually
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