From the title and the movie jacket there is no mystery as to what "Containment" is about. There has been an outbreak of a mysterious virus and the British government wishes to contain it before it spreads too far. I've seen enough of these types of movies and a few of them have been done really well. I expected this movie to be along the lines of "Contagion", "REC" and others like them.

"Containment" started off really hot. Right away the main character finds himself locked into his own flat. From that point on it is a matter of finding out why. He is joined by other neighbors and one of them is just a powder keg ready to blow. It was at the time of the neighbors joining one another that the movie began to sour for me.

I get that you need drama in movies for them to be exciting and worthwhile and a lot of times the drama comes from the characters themselves, but these characters were just plain unlikable. I get that stressful situations brings about certain behavior, but is it too much for people (neighbors no less) to be in accord just once? Because they were quarantined together I had to put up with this maddening motley crew for the entire movie. The focus was very local, as in you knew nothing more than what was going on at the apartment building under quarantine so all decisions being made were with the information available to the imprisoned. The containment situation went from bad to worse as level-headedness gave way to hysteria.

CONTAINMENT is a modern-day British horror flick about a disparate group of characters trapped in a single location. That set-up has already played out admirably in the likes of TOWER BLOCK, a film that looks like a masterpiece in comparison to this one. Sadly, CONTAINMENT has a poor script with no real beginning, middle, or end, and it's one of those films where virtually nothing happens throughout.

Most of the faults can be laid at the door of the scriptwriters, who fail to make any of the characters remotely sympathetic. Conflict between the protagonists feels artificial and tacked-on in order to keep viewers interested. It doesn't work. There's no incident, action, or real horror, just a few sequences of characters shouting which is hardly enthralling. The ending requires the viewer to care about the fate of a couple of the characters and needless to say that by this stage all interest has long since vanished.

Virus and infection ridden movies really can be viewed differently nowadays ... while it looks like we are hopefully towards the end of a pandemic, we can still feel the effects of it. In this case, we have no idea what is going on - the movie is really good in keeping us in a closed space.

It probably is budget related, but still it works for the movie. So if you like indie horror movies, with flaws included of course, than you could do worse than this little movie that could.