SHIP OF HORROR
‘The Last Cruise’ is saga of early COVID outbreak
February 2020 was, for many people, the last month before the world turned on its head. But for those aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the nightmare had already begun.
Hannah Olson’s “The Last Cruise,” sailing onto HBO on Tuesday, explores the horrific and literally sickening saga of the ship, the site of the first major coronavirus outbreak outside mainland China. Featuring footage straight from the phones of confused passengers and fearful crew members, the documentary short paints a picture of a cautionary tale too many governments failed to heed until it was too late.
“People on every deck were recording their lives around the clock. And it was like, what happens when your vacation footage becomes the plot point in a global horror story? And all of a sudden, things that you didn’t think would matter ... matter,” Olson, whose directorial debut was the network’s 2020 documentary, “Baby God,” told the Daily News Wednesday.
The captain announced on Feb. 3, the final night of a roughly two-week cruise around Asia, that a Hong Kong resident who recently left the ship had been diagnosed with the virus.
As a result, the ship went into quarantine in Yokohama, Japan, and by the time the Indonesian crew members — the last people left on the ship, according to the film — were evacuated on March 1, the vessel had seen 712 infections and 14 passenger deaths.
“I think a lot of people were watching the ship and it was kind of the first real sense that like, this could be something that is larger,” said Olson, who quickly took to social media to follow related hashtags and see if she could track down those aboard who were quoted in the media.
The film has two primary narratives: the “information vacuum” in which passengers, crew and the rest of the world found themselves as the virus continued to spread, and the clear class divide between passengers and crew members.
The lack of information was “part of what’s terrifying about the experience,” said Olson, who opted not to use the interviews she filmed with experts “to limit the information the viewer has to what was known at the time by those on the boat” and take viewers back to the “dismissal, denial, fear, panic, uncertainty” everyone felt in early 2020.
Olson started piecing together the “disconnects” between what she saw online — such as crew members “working, eating, sleeping together” amid the supposed quarantine — and what was being reported by the American government and media, like advice to wash hands and avoid buying masks.
Already in contact with those aboard the ship, Olson was simultaneously viewing footage from passengers. “And I’m like, ‘OK, you know, if all I need to do is wash my hands, why is the U.S. government sending their people onto the ship in hazmat suits?’ ” recalled Olson, who used the film to explore “what the relative comfort of the passengers cost those below deck.”
“It’s like, do they not count?” she recalled thinking, noting that, just as with essential workers in America, “some people get to be in quarantine and others have to be human shields.”
One of the most haunting moments shows American passengers evacuated on a cargo plane, masked up and unsure of exactly where they’re heading. Some passengers take note of a curtained-off area in the plane, which everyone passed by, where individuals confirmed to have COVID-19 are kept.
“I think that’s when I realized that this was kind of a found footage horror film. Or like a real-life horror film,” Olson said.