In a vacuum, New Life is watchable; properly contextualized, it’s a rock-solid mishmash of thriller and horror elements.

| Mar 13, 2025

It’s not a must see. But it’s determination to explore its new skin, with all its wounds, is worth watching if you are interested in zombies, disability, or their ugly, possibly enlightening intersection.

| Oct 4, 2024

... isn’t anything wildly invigorating in the pandemic subgenre of horror, character study of a patient zero and the ailing woman tasked to hunt her down does vastly set it apart from its contemporaries.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 3, 2024

New Life is a terrific directorial debut from John Rosman with outstanding performances and a narrative that grips you from the start and never lets go.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 4, 2024

While the first 15 minutes seem a little too deliberate, once the ball gets rolling and the facts literally spill, Rosman promises a finish you won’t forget any time soon.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 18, 2024

With slick, visual style, writer-director John Rosman skilfully keeps everything grounded, which makes the bonkers craziness and excellent makeup work that much more effective.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2024

Amid the dumper-truck of post-Covid lockdown-inspired films, very few take disease and pandemics themselves as their central focus. So John Rosman’s stripped-back but effective debut is a sobering flashback to those incubative early days.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2024

New Life entertains with fast-moving shooting action, creepy screaming creatures, ample guts, and moments of profound humanity.

| Original Score: 7/10 | May 22, 2024

While New Life holds few pleasures as it twists and convulses into new genres, it excels at glimpses of terror and jaded job execution.

| May 22, 2024

An unsettling relevance lingers beneath the surface of this taut and tightly wound thriller that puts a fresh spin on familiar genre conventions.

| May 10, 2024

New Life is filled with potential, moving close but stopping on the edge of excellence. A well-acted, well-directed, well-written film to help you turn off the world for a few moments.

| Original Score: B | May 10, 2024

While the horror moments in the film are far more effective than the dramatic moments, New Life keeps viewers hooked and engaged throughout.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | May 10, 2024

Surprisingly compassionate and ultimately compelling, this ironically titled debut might under the skin of those who may be immune to the usual methods of pandemic panic.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 9, 2024

“Rosman builds to a powerful resolution and ideal ending moment in ‘New Life,’ using gore and traditional methods to escalate the tension, and then pulls the rug away from the audience — a reminder of who’s in control, a tease of what’s to come.”

| May 9, 2024

Lovers of hard-core horror with elements of science fiction and allusions to body horror, rejoice. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 7, 2024

A deeply human piece wrapped in the skin of a thriller, New Life will stick with you for years to come.

| May 7, 2024

This interesting attempt to mix body-horror suspense with character drama doesn't entirely work, because the intended psychological depths are underdeveloped. But it's worth a gander, not least for former Berkeley Rep company member Tony Amendola.

| May 6, 2024

‘New Life’ combines them with bursts of blood and fury, but the tenseness provides some emotional brevity to push it past a theme we’re familiar with.

| May 6, 2024

Rosman falls back on an all-too-familiar bag of tricks to conjure some would-be scares.

| May 6, 2024

The possibility of an anticlimax becomes something more akin to an inevitability.

| May 6, 2024