Coronavirus: the movie is somehow already here – but are we ready for it?
In these times of self-isolation, it’s easy to sit back and plot the type of coronavirus movie you’d like to make. Maybe it’s one about an embattled team of scientists and their desperate search for a vaccine. Maybe it’s one about an estranged father who has to fight his way through police lines in order to give his son a birthday present. Maybe – because not everything can be a gritty drama – it’s a hilarious comedy about a man whose trousers fall down whenever he coughs.
Related: From Panic Room to Cabin Fever: films about isolation, to watch in self-isolation
Either way, the ideas you have right now are just that: ideas. If you had any real gumption, you’d have followed the footsteps of the Canadian director Mostafa Keshvari and already written and shot an entire coronavirus feature film.
Because, incredibly, Keshvari appears to have done just that. Entitled Corona, the film takes place entirely within the confines of an elevator. Neighbours of different backgrounds enter – a Chinese lady, a pregnant woman, a wheelchair-bound Nazi with a swastika tattoo on his forehead – and panic begins to spread just as quickly as the disease. Or, as the movie’s tagline puts it, “Fear is a Virus”.
A trailer for the film has already been released. Not to give too much away but – if I’m reading this right – the Chinese woman starts coughing, which causes the elevator to stall. The lights go out. The emergency lights kick in, and for some reason they’re red flashing submarine-style lights. Someone screams: “We’re all going to die in here!” The Nazi pulls out a gun. The Chinese woman starts crying. And then a man says: “I think we’re all being tested,” which leads me to believe that Corona will posit that the spread of Covid-19 is down to an evil Saw-style puppet who created the virus in a lab as an unnecessarily complicated no-win morality test for humanity.
I could be wrong, and I won’t know until Corona hits the streaming services soon. But still, you can’t knock the director’s ambition. Keshvari had written the film, shot it and cut the trailer by 8 March, days before overt public jumpiness and weeks before the lockdown. You may have seen the spectre of the virus as a threat to your friends and family, but not Keshvari. He saw it as an opportunity to make a name for himself.
He’s by no means a beginner – his short film I Ran was selected in the 2015 Cannes Short Corner Film Festival – but by almost definitely making the world’s first coronavirus feature film, Keshvari’s stock is bound to rise. Not an awful lot is known about him but, judging by his IMDb page, he used to be a banker, he gained a scholarship at Vancouver Film School, he’s making a thriller about women’s rights, he’s a published poet and his personal quotes include: “Your life is a movie, direct it before someone else will” and “Point the camera where the light is and pull focus on your dreams.” Hopefully he has a long movie career ahead of him. But, if he doesn’t, you get the feeling that he’d do quite well in the inspirational vinyl wall decal business.
What’s even more impressive about Corona is that Keshvari was able to add a level of en vogue artistry to the film, by recording the whole thing in a single shot. It should be seen as a distant cousin to 1917, perhaps.
When all this blows over and we’re hit with a deluge of Contagion-style films about the virus – some by established auteurs, some by plucky up-and-comers – we should make sure that we don’t forget about Corona. We shouldn’t have to watch it, because God knows time is precious, but we shouldn’t forget about it.
