Alien meets Alien³ meets an Ireland farm to produce…Cows. In Billy O’Brien’s little horror film big city scares of epidemics and genetic mutations gone haywire go back to their rural roots. When a doctor’s vague generic experiment to increase the fertility of cows leads to a fetus biting a veterinarian and calves are born pregnant, something isn’t right on the farm.

The farmer (John Lynch)—impoverished it seems, thus his acceptance of his cattle being guinea pigs—and two young lovers fleeing the city from something-or-another (Ruth Negga and Sean Harris) get holed up on the farm due to the doctor’s (Crispin Letts) theory that the mutation is finding hosts in order to reproduce. The little buggers are tiny parasitic things, all teeth and bones, and they burrow into and then burst out of their host bodies in a manner entirely similar to Ridley Scott’s vision of a viral alien that plants its seed, kill their host by eating their way out of the body, and moves on. A tried-and-true horror, yes, and one that is good enough to repeat, but the necessary bits to keep us interested are lacking. There is little to no dynamics between the characters in O’Brien’s film; just barely enough hints are dropped to explain, say, why the farmer would want to experiment on his limited stock and why two 20-somethings end up in the middle of nowhere, but the parasitic calf-creature generally keeps everyone, including the film, too antsy to do anything but fearfully wonder what the terror is, and then fearfully wonder where it is.

Despite handsome ‘scope photography by Robbie Ryan, and the intrigue produced from an opening sequence that vividly brings out the disturbing strangeness of the farm setting (during an eerily difficult birth, the farmer uses a winch to tug, crank and pull the calf out of the pregnant cow by its creepy, bloody hooves), the redundancy of the scenario and the conventionality of the plot means Isolation’s characters or setting had better be strong. Aside from the obvious connection between this parasitic cow plague and the continued real world scares over anthrax and mad cow disease, the film does not exactly embrace to the allegorical or metaphoric potential of the most powerful horror films. Isolation does get momentarily interesting when the doctor, who, it must be kept in mind, is the one responsible for coming to this small farm and breeding a virus which could then spread to major cities, makes a couple scientific deductions and comes to the conclusion it is safer not just to isolate the farm but kill off any infected members. This, of course, is standard zombie plot mechanics—the fear of the bitten one that he or she will be ostracized and finally sacrificed for the good of the group—but the doctor’s rational is far from crazy, and momentarily his desire to kill makes the conventions of the film render him the monster, not the cow-creature, even when the audience can sympathize and perhaps encourage his bloody course of action to end the spread of the virus. But neither the doctor nor the rest of the characters have any real moral, social, or human dimensions, and O’Brien’s keeps his film, if anything, too lean and focused on the horror, paying only lip service to those being terrorized and the implications of what they are being terrorized by.