The scene in Infection that hit me hardest has a woman working on a work presentation beside her mother's hospital bed. As her mother (Lisa Partridge) talks about the nice nurse, and the difference in pudding cups, the clacking of her daughter's keyboard overwhelms the audio, blocking out the loved one mere inches away. There is something horrifyingly familiar about being physically present with someone you love while your attention remains attached to a screen, and this short holds that dark mirror right up to your eyes.
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Fans of Apple's Severance will recognize something of its atmosphere here. The sterile office and the creeping sense that employment requires a surrender of personhood brought that series immediately to mind. But I also felt an edge of Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer whose stories so often make ordinary reality difficult to trust. Infection has some of the compact, unsettling quality I love in classic science-fiction short stories: one strange premise allowed to work its way into the everyday until the everyday itself starts looking diseased.
Jane (Isabel Adele Brown) is an office worker with a sick mother, presumed financial pressure, and an interest in promotion. But her workplace is alien at the edges (despite the Apple computer logos), and her boss's mysterious illness gives the idea of professional advancement a troubling physical dimension. I could easily see a setup like this becoming heavy-handed, but the strong performance from Brown and the sharp cinematography give the ideas here a satisfying visual life that immediately suck you in.
I especially liked the framing that removes people's heads within these workplace hierarchies. A body can loom over Jane while the face remains outside the composition, creating the stark experience of implied social rank rather than an exchange between individuals.
The elevated views into Jane's workstation extend that pressure. The cubicle walls contain her; later, the frontal compositions behind the executive desk give her advancement a visual form. The chair and patterned panels still enclose her. Getting ahead looks surprisingly similar to being put in your place. It's a reminder that moving up the hierarchy leaves you just as vulnerable, just as isolated and imprisoned, as being lower down.
The sets are simple, and that simplicity lends an elegance to the film's atmosphere. A few partitions and carefully chosen backgrounds give the camera enough structure to build an oppressive little world. The color grading does considerable work too: the muted green-gray office feels unhealthy even before the disease acquires our full attention. There is some very good editing here. Also, the practical makeup and prosthetic effects are genius and manage to give the disease a potent and increasingly alarming physical presence (alongside truly grotesque soundscapes).
But, for all the the whole is excellent, I keep returning to the hospital scene. Jane has a practical reason to pursue the promotion, and the likely cost of her mother's care makes that pressure difficult to dismiss. Many of us know that burden. I, for one, am intimately familiar with how horrible it is to feel helpless to help in the face of heartless bureaucracy. So it's easy to identify with Jane in this moment. And yet the very work she hopes will help her mother is already consuming the time she could spend with her, time that seems to be fast running out. And all the while, as Jane's fingers dance across her clacking keys, the background drone of her mother's voice, her small attempts at conversation, make that loss intimate in a particularly keen manner.
I also couldn't help connecting the metaphors within the film to the deep investment, and sometimes addiction, that comes with continued AI use. As my professional life has connected ever more deeply with work in AI, I've had to grapple with versions of that investment myself. The promise of getting more done can make another hour of involvement feel entirely reasonable, even as the habit begins to occupy more of your life. Infection gave me an uncomfortable way to think about that process, and about the spread of artificial intelligence through a world already organized around violent demands for greater productivity.
If I were to name any critical reservations, it would have to be the dialogue clarity. The nondiegetic sound—the score and sounds outside the characters' immediate world—is excellent, as is the non-dialogue diagetic work, but I sometimes struggled to hear the characters actually speaking, particularly Jane's boss (Daniel Williams-Lopez). This is a frustration I have with plenty of contemporary films: a performance aiming for conversational realism can drift into mumbling, and an insufficiently clear mix makes the problem worse. Here, it occasionally gets between us and an otherwise absorbing scene. But this is a minor quibble for an otherwise engrossing piece.
Infection is absolutely worth watching. If you enjoy Severance, put it on your list. And if you've ever kept working while someone you love waited for your attention, this film just might be the reminder you need to throw away your laptop and spend time doing what really matters.
