TIN CAN – directed by Seth A Smith – SPOILERS

At the start of things we hear a newscaster (voiced by Shelley Thompson) saying: “Since its May discovery, the fungal infection has quickly swept across the Maritime provinces and Quebec. Although no related deaths have been confirmed, researchers are racing to assess the full risks associated with the pathogen. Now, one in twenty-five Canadians is living with the untreatable disease.” Later it is explained that the pathogen is called Coral and, like a slime mould, can live as a single cell or combine to form more complex structures. Its spores are heavy, so it spreads mostly through direct contact, and eventually forms a casing over the entire body. After that, Coral begins to change its host. (We are not told into what.)

Parasitologist Offret Greyl (Anna Hopkins) is on the verge of curing the plague when she is struck on the head with a pipe, and wakes up attached to life support inside a metal container. Voices, some of which she recognizes, can be heard and once her initial panic subsides she manages to pry open an air vent and get a view of her surroundings. Fret speaks with an older man who is similarly containerized, and watches someone in a metallic suit extract him and take him through a gate of some sort. After that, screams are heard in the distance. Then Fret has a conversation with the voice of John Schmidt (Simon Mutabazi).

FRET: “We need to tell someone before they start the process.”
JOHN: “Too late for that. [pauses] I’m just saying it might be too late.”
FRET: “No, there’s no way that I’m doing this.”
JOHN: “I think we may already have. I’ve been pumped full of
the antifreeze. Is your body numb? Better than crystalized, I suppose.”

John suggests that Fret might not remember signing up for preservation because “the dormancy can affect your prefrontal cortex”. John is there because he was infected. (Flashbacks show Fret preparing him for something called “Torpor Induction”.) We also are shown a “Disclosure and Consent – Dual Admission Agreement” made out for Fret and John, but if Fret had signed that, it would have been unnecessary to whack her with a pipe. It’s worth noting that the name Offret means “the victim” in Swedish.

John is a blood engineer for a cryogenics company called VASE, and he recruited Fret after learning that she was fascinated by slime moulds. (He told her that VASE was working on something related to those things.) Fret waxes poetic about the moulds: “Each piece is like a perfect society,” she explains. “It works together in full cooperation, and then even if it gets separated, the cells always find a way to reunite.”

In a series of flashbacks, we see that John and Fret were living together until John was caught having an affair with co-worker Darcy (Amy Trefry). Later, as Fret is walking home from work, she sees a man walking a three-legged dog. The dog drinks from a puddle which is close to a patch of Coral fungus, so the dog and its owner will certainly become infected. When she gets home, John is there to return his key, and he shows her the fungal growth on his abdomen.

The opening frame is a close-up of a blue flower, and in the course of things we see John hand Fret similar flowers on a bus. The final frame (probably in a flashback) is a close-up of a pink flower with six black organisms (?) on one of its petals, and we see Fret pick it. (She is identifiable by the sleeve of her brown coat.)

While fiddling with her octagonal wedding ring (prior to her abduction) Fret gets an idea which leads to the discovery that a colloidal suspension of gold nanoparticles stops Coral from spreading. (Oddly, slime mould, the behaviour of which Coral at least partially emulates, literally eats heavy metals for breakfast.)

One wonders if some of the flowers Fret touched might have been contaminated with the fungus, and her gold wedding ring protected her from infection.

With its three-to-two aspect ratio, TIN CAN is best seen in a theatre. The best way to watch it at home would be with as large a display as possible in as dark a room as possible. Watching Fret bring her terror and confusion quickly under control is an intense experience, and the womb-like nature of Fret’s container comes across much better without peripheral distractions.

All is not clearly resolved at the end of things but it does seem that Fret’s cure for Coral is quite similar to the disease, and that true love does finally win out.

Asked how he and co-writer Darcy Spidle developed the story, director Seth A Smith explained that they wanted to do something in the “deep end” of science fiction. He told William J Wright of Rue Morgue: “The location kind of got smaller and smaller until we were talking about a person in a barrel. I was also doing a lot of research into factory farming. It’s a horrible thing, but I was kind of inspired by it in the context of a horror movie – just what animals go through in this industrial process. If you saw a person going through something like that, I felt like it would really resonate with people, although we went with a much different sci-fi approach.”

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TIN CAN can be streamed on TUBI, and is available on Blu-ray.