The email hit my inbox in mid-May. The reader kept things succinct.
Subject: Remember Domain?
Body: I've been thinking about this a lot lately:
Two months into a global pandemic obviously sticking around for a bit, I can't say I had put much thought into a sci-fi B-movie I saw once several years back. But upon mention, I did instantly and vaguely remember Domain. I caught a screener for Ars ahead of a small sci-fi-only film festival in December 2016, and the premise stuck with me more than the plot or any single performance. In this unabashedly indie film (read: high-concept, super specific, and low-budget aesthetic), a viral pandemic called the Saharan Flu keeps racking up a body count. "The World Health Organization says it's potentially civilization-threatening," public broadcasts declare within the film's opening minutes after 5,000 deaths (only!) sweep across Germany, Egypt, and Italy.
Ho-hum, another pandemic film, you say. We have a million of those. In fact, not even writer/director Nathaniel Atcheson had been recently thinking about Domain in light of our current predicament (I called and asked in June). But what happens in-film after its fictional pandemic makes Domain disturbingly prescient four years later. The movie follows seven people from across the United States, but most of the action takes place in similar-looking bunkers because humanity has been forced to quarantine en masse. And in this alternate version of the present day, the government requires these groups to keep tabs on each other by communicating through ever-present video chat—it's not Zoom, FaceTime, Google Meet, or Skype; it's the titular Domain.
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