Discomfort Zone

High-concept, no-frills horror is writer-director-editor-composer Andy Mitton’s modus operandi. While his four features (the first two co-directed with Jesse Holland) address vaster subjects of death and the afterlife, there’s also a recognition that dread lurks in the most mundane places. Terror is inescapable. It’s found in your dream house or your actual dreams, or has literally latched itself onto you. Mitton’s is some of the sharpest writing in modern horror. Even when relying on familiar elements, his films feel like something altogether their own. And in an age when most movies’ runtimes are needlessly bloated, he is also a master of concision, with only one of his films (just barely) exceeding 90 minutes—a brevity that in no way shortchanges his characters. Their relationships, especially of the familial variety, are given more-than-adequate breathing space; there’s just no fat to trim.

This unusual deep-thinking but stripped-bare approach turns out to be a natural fit for the quarantine film. “COVID movies” immediately faced resistance from those not interested in reexperiencing the harsher beginnings of something we have yet to escape, but with The Harbinger, Mitton makes the strongest case yet for this subgenre’s existence. It’s the first film to truly capture the emotional horror of those early days of lockdown, when we wiped down groceries and toilet seats and were petrified of getting within six feet of others, catching the virus, or, worse, infecting a loved one. Venturing anywhere public felt almost like a personal attack on your chosen hive members, and The Harbinger’s heroine Monique (Gabby Beans) is certainly treated like a betrayer by her father and brother (Raymond Anthony Thomas and Myles Walker) after announcing that she might need to burst their quarantine bubble. They are in the midst of celebrating the dad’s birthday when Monique receives a phone call for help from an old college buddy, Mavis (Emily Davis)—whom we see traumatized in the film’s opening sequence, clawing her arm to a bloody mess while mysteriously imploring herself to “wake up”—and because her friend has no one else, Monique decides to trade her upstate security for the hell of an unknown Queens apartment building. En route, the fear of traveling is palpable, and before even making it to Mavis’s front door, she encounters a very sick child and an unhinged neighbor who refuses to wear a mask and keep her distance in shared spaces. But once behind closed doors, the two hesitantly decide to go maskless and things temporarily feel “normal” again—just friends catching up over drinks, joyful for the companionship.   

But this place is no safe haven: Mavis reveals she’s been having terrible, persistent nightmares, to the extent that she often doesn’t know when she’s in or out of them, and is losing hours, even days, of her life. And when she does wake, it’s just to be thrown back into the real nightmare of the pandemic. Monique herself begins having horrific dreams, but still questions her friend’s mental state. Willing to play along, she offers to sketch Mavis’s description of what she has been seeing in her sleep, and recognizes it as the plague doctor, a historical figure unfamiliar to Mavis. Posting the image online in hopes of locating others in the same predicament leads to a chaotic call with a demonologist (Laura Heisler), who’s forced to do consultations via Zoom as her young children run around in the background. She introduces the idea of a harbinger—an evil spirit that thrives on the isolation of the pandemic, because it provides more space for exploiting fear, ultimately taking over its victim completely. This not-exactly-hopeful theory sets the stage for the increasingly surreal series of mostly dream-life sequences that the film becomes.