In 2022’s The Harbinger, Gabby Beans stars as Monique. At the height of the COVID hysteria, Monique and her family have done everything that they’ve been told to do. They’ve locked their doors. They’ve kept outsiders from entering their home. Monique always wears a facemask. For all of their attempts to be safe, Monique and her family still seem like the most anxious people on the planet. However, anyone who is honest about the COVID era and who doesn’t listen to the revisionists who insist that it was actually just a little inconvenience and not a major trauma-causing event will immediately recognize Monique and her family. Even those of us who didn’t lose our minds during the lockdowns all know someone who did.
(Three things that I’ll never forget about the COVID era: 1) all of my friends on Twitter changing their bio to “Wear your damn mask” and not understanding how pointlessly aggressive that sounded, 2) my cousin Allison in tears because she thought everyone in Tyler, Texas was trying to kill her by getting her sick, and 3) the fat lady at Target who screamed at me because I wasn’t wearing a mask because my asthma was acting up.)
When Monique learns that her best friend, Mavis (Emily Davis), is currently being haunted by nonstop nightmares that are threatening her sanity, Monique makes a momentous decision. She decides to leave her house, drive through New York, and check on her friend. What she discovers is that Mavis, locked away in her apartment and even wearing a mask when she’s inside and alone, is even more anxious than her. In the apartment above her, there’s a child who is sick and in quarantine and who, in theory, could infect everyone with COVID. Meanwhile, Mavis’s neighbor thinks the whole masking inside thing is ludicrous and refuses to put on one. Monique loses some points, in my book at least, when she confronts the neighbor and points to a sign that says masks are required in the building. The movie tries to hedge its bets with the neighbor character, as if it’s saying, “See? We’re on the right side!” What’s funny is that, when I watched this movie with the #ScarySocial live tweet group, most of the people watching were pretty much on the neighbor’s side.
Soon, Monique is having nightmares, both about the sick kid upstairs and also about her family back home. The nightmares are the film’s strongest element. The Harbinger really does capture the feeling of finding yourself in a dream that feels like real life, and I have to admit that it succeeded in fooling me more than a few times. The film really does keep you off-balance as to what is real and what isn’t. Ultimately, the film suggests that a monster is feeding off of all of the fear and anxiety in the world. If such a monster did exist, the COVID era is definitely when it would show up.
The Harbinger has its flaws. Like a lot of “elevated” horror films, the pace is a bit slow at times. There was an interesting subtext to the intensity of Monique and Mavis’s friendship that felt a bit unexplored. But the dream sequences are effectively done and the film does capture the bleak worldview that many held during the COVID era. (We tend to forget that The New York Times referred to the pre-COVID era as “the before times.”) Today, as the truth about the COVID era itself is being rewritten by revisionists, this film almost feels like a time capsule.
