Contracted

Contracted was interesting. Weird. But interesting.

Continuing my involuntary string of movies with lesbians, the protagonist of our show is a lesbian who is no longer in a relationship (although she doesn’t know it and acts in a kind of “let’s boil the bunny” way about it). To help her get over her breakup, a friend invites her to a party where she gets drunk and has sex with a guy.

This leads to pretty much every disgusting thing going wrong with one’s body that one could imagine. Pulling off her own fingernails made me cringe. Even the hair loss thing, which has been done endlessly, was pretty creepy. We’ve got teeth and bleeding and skin and a rash and a seemingly idiotic doctor. (The only real clunker line in this movie was one of the doctor’s lines about not giving her antitibiotics “because over the counter medications” might not work and “we won’t know until we get the tests back”. Very paraphrased, but not far off. I remember thinking “Wait…antibiotics are over-the-counter now? That’s not right.” Actually, all the medical stuff felt mostly like “I went to a gynecologist once then looked up a bunch of stuff online”.)

My prediction that she was incubating alien spawn was wrong. (I’m pretty sure it was wrong. A bit of an open-ended ending that seems more likely to be the “start of the apocalypse” versus alien babies.)

Not horribad. Not even really bad. There’s kind of a “must watch this slow trainwreck in motion” vibe to it. Plus there are lots of lessons to learn from this movie (I wouldn’t say it’s anti-woman or anti-lesbian, it’s more like a creative resetting of a standard trope without it being tedious):

Do not decorate your bedroom in purple.

Do not have unprotected sex with men.

If you do have unprotected sex with men, don’t do it in the back of a car.

If you do have unprotected sex with men in the back of a car, don’t do it in a car with 6-8 tree-shaped air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.

Dear god LOOK AT THE FACE OF THE PERSON YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE SEX WITH. Really, horny teenager? Those eyes? That mouth? And you’re still all “LET’S DO THIS THING”? Pay attention, man!

Loving a lesbian is likely to get you killed.

It is not supposed to tingle. EVER. (Barring some special lubricant. Even then… )

If it does tingle, STOP.

If it does tingle and you don’t stop, DON’T LOOK AT THE FLOOR!

If it does tingle and you don’t stop and you look at the floor, DON’T GO IN THE BATHROOM!

If it does tingle and you don’t stop and you look at the floor and you go in the bathroom, DON’T LOOK BEHIND THE SHOWER CURTAIN!

I give it three brain pans.