Quarantine: Make or Break

Alexandra Jarvis reviews the latest sequel to the film Quarantine and remarks upon its relevance

Alexandra Jarvis

"It was decided that another 120 intense, money-spinning minutes of lockdown chaos were needed"Nadya Miryanova

Following on from the success of Quarantine – the inaugural film reviewed in June last year that summarised our experiences of those hot, frustrated few months – another film has been released by the same director. It was decided that another 120 intense, money-spinning minutes of lockdown chaos were needed to fully process being plunged into a third lockdown days into 2021. For those of you that have tried to block the entirety of 2020 out of your mind, this is a warning to look away now.

We said that Quarantine was the ultimate film of the year, depicting us at our worst. We had seen nothing yet.

Quarantine: Make or Break takes us back to the same place as the first Quarantine, heightening the suffocating sense of familiarity and routine that many have been missing. We return to this strangely familiar world a few days into lockdown 3.0, when all of our beloved characters (along with some new faces) are coming to terms with the fact that the pandemic didn’t end with 2020. We encounter the same three flats as in the first film – but, despite returning to the same characters, we are met with a very different scene.

“We had seen nothing yet”

Gail and Jason are standing firm in their marriage once more. They had been left struggling after the beautiful drinking weather had impacted their dwindling work commitments, but were brought back together by their combined attacks on Wall Street, which made a healthy, welcome change to their usual routine. Their sparky daughter Becky, now seven, is working on their latest TikTok series. Once they tired of dancing to Say So, they moved onto reviewing true crime podcasts, but quickly took up denouncing the insurrectionists from the Capitol building and passing on quick and easy housebound how to’s.

Indie and Insta, their neighbours to the left, are struggling. This is solely due to Insta’s spate of apology videos about her inadvertent work trip to Dubai. Indie, on the other hand, has blossomed. She finally realised that she was a lesbian, entirely unrelated to the fact that she changed her dating profile location to the States, her preference to “Conservative,” and goaded men into sending photos of them in the Capitol. She acts as one of Becky’s anonymous sources.

The man living above them, whose similarity to Timothée Chalamet has begun to cause emotional trauma, now has a friend named Flavio living with him. We can suspect that he’s gay because he’s called Flavio, and he wears spandex in most of his scenes. As an aside, the author would like to ask whether the director has ever met a gay man before. Wholesome moments include the montage where Flavio helps Timothée over the fact that his filmic lookalike’s co-star is allegedly a cannibal with an overhaul of his life and wardrobe.

Due to high streaming figures last summer, in the height of the phase when people were so desperate they watched things like Tiger King, the budget for this latest release was clearly increased between films. Big-name cameos are billed to appear throughout, although this author struggled to see any. The back of Lisa Kudrow’s head may appear in the refreshing off-set scene in the grocery aisle of Sainsbury’s, and one could believe Jack Black to be the tower-block maintenance worker if you squint a little.

“Wonderfully light-hearted, and painfully shallow.”

Notable moments in the film include the director’s decision to intersperse tweets throughout the narrative. This occurs on three occasions, the first being the most entertaining as it deals with the change of tier systems made over Christmas. If it took any effort to keep track of the superficial plot, these breaks might be referred to as interruptions. There are also some spectacularly heart-warming moments spread throughout. This author’s personal favourite remains the time that the flats decide to play Among Us together – despite the slight incongruence of timeline (this phenomenon was most popular in the autumn of 2020, when these events are clearly set several months later). Less heart-warming, though, is the chaos when Jason inadvertently kills Timothée in Electrical, before denouncing his wife and having her ejected from the craft.


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The tone of the film is wonderfully light-hearted and painfully shallow. Admittedly, it does accurately reflect the wider tone of the lockdown. Increased amounts of sexual tension are worked into the film through mirror shots and tasteful scenes filmed in bathrooms with long lenses from a neighbouring balcony. This is entirely to be expected as we near the one-year anniversary of avoiding anyone we’re unrelated to.

Topical and vaguely entertaining if it weren’t so disturbing, much like the news at the minute. Quarantine: Make or Break is merely another in a long line of stories that didn’t need any further additions (think Bridgerton). Sadly, true to life, we didn’t end on a high with just the one lockdown. Less tasteful than hoped for, relevant, and accurate. 4/5 stars