Being honest upfront, regardless of how good Seth A. Smith’s latest film Tin Can is, I am not particularly too excited for a full half-a-decade plus of “pandemic cinema,” that’s surely coming down the pike. Smith is early, and his film is strong, so he gets away with it here. But I’m also very much of the mindset that I could probably do without films wherein there’s a deadly parasite going around for a while now, thank you!

Regardless, Tin Can stars Arrow’s Anna Hopkins as a parasitologist named Fret on the verge of a breakthrough in curing a rapidly spreading fungal infection that has ravaged the world. Unfortunately, Fret is kidnapped and placed into a literal tin can. When Fret awakens, she discovers that she is not alone, and is surrounded by a group of people in a similar predicament who must work together to figure out how they will both survive and possibly escape.

In past films such as The Crescent, Smith has been known for two things. One is how stripped down his films are, as they consist of stripped-down scenarios and slowly parceled out backstories. Secondly, is his capacity to play in genre spaces. Here, Smith recreates sci-fi aesthetics and matches them to a conspiracy-like survival thriller. Fret’s eponymous tin can, for example, is hexagonally designed. As if to ape a very specific look and feel that is particularly noticeable when it’s coated in an amber light. However, Smith attaches this to Cronenbergian levels of fluid and mucous. The images are both arresting and memorable. And this is especially so as the film falls deeper and deeper into its trappings I’m not excited for a decade of pandemic parallels. But I am excited about this.