New Strains
Written and Directed by Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw
Starring Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw
Runtime 78 minutes
Now playing in New York and LA, premieres on demand July 19th

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Let’s get this out of the way first: when I first saw the promotional material for New Strains, I assumed the title was a weed pun. Now I think it’s just a play on strain as a stressor or as in a COVID variant. Maybe it’s just because it wasn’t as funny as I thought (but maybe I’d have enjoyed it more if I were stoned).

Like many recent releases, the film takes “the COVID era” to be an era of narrative plasticity: of rules declared and promptly bent; of confused statistics-watching; of armchair biology; most of all, of pure, rarefied boredom. In order to distill the essence of this boredom, filmmakers/stars Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw have collapsed two distinct phases of pandemic life: the early full isolation, complete with misaimed fixation on shared surfaces competing with masks and distancing; and a later period of relaxation tinged with paranoia over new waves, new variations. New Strains works with this mixed reality insofar as it makes things seem less real.

Ram (Kamalakanthan) and Kalia (Shaw) arrive together for their first ever couple’s vacation, at Kalia’s uncle’s New York apartment (I’m presuming the location—New York is unavoidable). This is already an ill-advised plan, even if the rent is free; but now scientists are warning of a new, worse variant, whose hallmark is cognitive decline. Full isolation and a travel ban are in effect; and if Ram and Kalia don’t stay sane together, it’s a mark of infection.

When things do go south, Kalia says to Ram that “it’s like, I don’t believe that we’re a real couple.” Life gets cliché faster than new clichés need to get established. To counteract social existence’s rapid tropisms would mean being openly human and flawed all the time—and who knows what pain being known may bring?

The film’s editing emphasizes cuts either from subject to subject, or those breaking up a single action. The rifts ring louder than Ram and Kalia’s togetherness. Time splinters within a jump cut, though rather than flashing forward, cutting up Kalia’s outdoor stroll seems to create a single present, while the space she moves through is discontiguous.

There is no home. But let’s not confuse actual precarity—homelessness—with the anonymity of no home in particular. Camcorder aesthetics give New Strains a juvenile feel: VHS millennial memorabilia, its blotchy colours and general roughness smoothing the edges of one’s memory. The apartment is temporary. The camera low, maybe I’m the kid watching mom and dad fight, replaying to see what they were really like.

Like I said before, New Strains might be a comedy. In every interaction between Ram and Kalia there is an air of detachment. This will help some laugh at these hapless millennial art school grads (Kalia is thinking of applying to grad school here. Ram is strapped with “like $250,000 in student loans” while “trying to be a fucking rapper. The two are models for millennial disillusionment). There is room for irony and pity alike in this apartment; the fact is that one will always precede the other. Before we know that Ram is a teacher as well as rapper desperate to get his mixtape heard, and that Kalia really does love him and his dedication to the music, we see her walk in on him hard at work on a “daily rap” spurred by Ice Cube’s Twitter putting out a challenge. Most awkward situations become funny as they go on. Here, we first have of a) Ice Cube as celebrity influencer and b) thirty-something men in lavish apartments who wish they were rappers, both funny things. The serious struggle comes later.

Right now, Ram is more concerned about the virus than Kalia is. He thinks this gives him a moral high ground. He’s also absorbed, too absorbed to bother with music, with the medical updates and their videos of “full grown adults [who] are turning into little kids.” He ropes Kalia into taking a “memory test” that may or may not be a data mining scheme. Is this the only way to open up… mediated by surveillance?

Kalia is the more tragic of the two: a flagrant hedonist on the surface, she is also struggling with being surveilled as a woman (this is how she’s meant to be seen, as frivolous). She does cardio with her friend over video call and apologizes for oversharing. Her body, shaking; she wills it: it’s an odd moment. As soon as she lands in the apartment (after arguing about sanitizing the luggage for a while), she logs the Delta Airlines pretzel packet on her calorie tracker. New Strains revels in its realism and invites us to these small horrors. And while there is pain in Kalia’s looking inwards, there is amelioration in the fragmented style, the arpeggiated synth score, vertical but not vertiginous, and the sensory cleanliness in an eyeline match. While Ram goes down on her Kalia tells him to go slow; she looks out the window, distracted. His face between her legs; her head, elsewhere; the window, through which she can see man bicycling in circles through his apartment’s shared balcony. More pleasure can be had vicariously than intimately. Colour is more colourful when corrupted, more real when strained.

There is still play to be had here: when the couple truly touch within the frame, they tap into digital video’s eroticism. Sometimes the wall of solid light is the realm of angels, and the isolated shot is a game who writes its own rules. It’s here that New Strains is at its most cynical as well: losing all sense of adult responsibility within the high rise bacchanal, the outside ceases to exist entirely. The only way to beat the strain, it seems, is to give up on a world beyond it.