FEVER

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS ©

The biggest surprise about this drab and frankly unremarkable post-outbreak drama isn't anything actually on screen except in the credits, where its auteur Hendrick Faller has apparently copyrighted his own name. Literally: there's a © after his surname. Why? Is there another filmmaker called Hendrick Faller and this one has decided to somehow stop the other from using his own name in the credits? Can he claim tax back on copyrighted items? Was it a botched attempt at an ironic smiley? Or was it just a typo by the data entry guy as he input everyone's names into the titles generator? I'll confess here and now that the mystery of the rogue © kept me more interested than the movie itself.

A micro-scale UK/France drama set in France, Fever (originally known as Mountain Fever even though there's not much mountain in it) concerns a young British man holing up in his parents' house to hopefully sit out an unspecified outbreak (rather than head for the rescue station in Lyon). He and a young Ukrainian woman are then trapped in the house, under siege by two aggressive, largely unseen French guys, but will they leave them (or just him) alone when they get what they want?

Much more a drama than the thriller promised on the artwork box, this is a glum and downbeat film, silent and miserable, in which none of the characters want to communicate or connect any more than they absolutely have to for the purposes of survival. Like its unspectacular apocalypse, there's no joy to be had from it: reduced to eating cold tinned food and shivering alone in the dark, it's an armageddon that's really not worth surviving. Difficult to see where the audience appeal might lie; all I can say is that it eluded me.

®