[Film Review] Wellness Check (2020)

An unsettling 5 minutes about a young woman who seems to have found a disturbing path towards human connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Host (2020) proved that there was in fact a way to utilize the stress of the pandemic for art without cannibalizing our own trauma. Beyond the obvious dangers of contagion and illness, there were some real secondary dangers that suddenly came into focus. One of which was being trapped in your own home when inside suddenly became more dangerous than out there. It was perhaps my favorite horror film from 2020. 

Wellness Check (2021), written and directed by Andrew Jara, focuses on a similar sort of tension in a compact 5 minute and 7-second story about a young woman (Katherine Smith Rodden) who keeps calling someone and leaving voicemails. It turns out she has a very different understanding of their relationship than the man (Adam Bussell) on the receiving end of her calls and eventually his outright rejection of her attempts to communicate sparks a dangerous escalation.

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Back in like 2015 vlog format internet shorts were all the rage. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries set off a series of copycat modern literary adaptations as 2-5 minute vlog entries that included the equally successful supernatural drama/horror series Carmilla. But then the vlog format got played out. Like post-Blair Witch Project found footage, eventually, the novelty was lost and the medium became distracting to the story. But the pandemic reinvigorated something about the format. The closed-in sides of the small viewfinder became claustrophobic walls moving ever closer in on us. You could talk to a blinking light and hope someone was listening. Your friends became thumbnail images in Zoom calls and when the camera went off, we went back to being undeniably alone. 

All of that simmers under the surface of Rodden’s character who opens the short with a plea for connection and the desire to check on a loved one. Her awkward laughs, the playing with her hair and fingers, we’ve all been that person on a video call over the past 2 years. Immediately, she and the audience understand each other. And that makes the blunt stop of Bussel’s character’s outright rejection jarring. What we thought was a couple separated by the chasm of quarantine turns out to be a woman in a parasocial relationship with a practical stranger. And while the ultimate climax of the short clearly paints a different picture than the sympathetic woman who opened the story for us, it’s hard to not at least understand where the motivations come from. 

The beauty of this short is how much it leaves up to the audience, which is the right move by Jara who knows his audience, knows what they’ve been through, and knows that our paranoid pandemic minds can fill in the gaps with all sorts of dark theories. It’s as much a piece of off-screen drama as it is about what happens on camera thanks to the capturing of a true cultural moment, a collective psyche, and some dark and disturbing urges we’re maybe afraid to admit we understand.

Ultimately, what this short achieves beyond the unsettling emotions it lets its audience sit with is proof that even tired forms can get new life with the right creative mind. The Blair Witch Project spoke to a moment in American culture – the rise of the 24-hour news cycle which became the constant need for content. Wellness Check speaks to what may in fact be the long-lasting psychological effects of social isolation under existential duress. Already we’ve seen certain antisocial attitudes reap havoc, the United States is suffering from the worst bout of vehicular deaths since the 1940s thanks to lack of patience, erratic behaviors, and a rise of driving under the influence. Domestic violence saw sharp increases during the pandemic where folks were forced into isolation with their abusers. Divorce rates skyrocketed as couples finally found the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a few short minutes Jara, Roden, and Bussel capture this mess of complex psychological and emotional rewirings and achieve a sense of dread perfectly fitting with a worldwide pandemic.

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