'It was like a horror film': inside the terror of the Covid cruise ship
Before the shutdowns and eerie images of a barren Times Square, before the bungled US federal response to a virus that has since killed 549,000 Americans and nearly 2.8m people worldwide, before most people even had a date they could loosely observe as a pandemic anniversary this past month, there was the Diamond Princess.
The cruise ship departed from Yokohama, Japan on 20 January 2020 for a roundtrip tour of southeast Asia.
On board was an 80-year-old passenger from Hong Kong who had recently visited Shenzen, Guangdong Province, China. At the time, there were only four confirmed cases of the then-unnamed
Covid-19 virus outside mainland China; within two weeks, the ship would be stalled in the Japanese harbor under
quarantine as the largest coronavirus outbreak outside Wuhan – 712 people, 14 of whom would die.
The Diamond Princess became both a closely observed coronavirus case study – a closed-loop epidemiology experiment for the novel virus – and a dire warning about the contagion’s asymptomatic carriers and airborne spread. But to the 3,711 people aboard (2,666 guests and 1,045 crew members), the two-week quarantine was a metastasizing real-life horror film tentacled by pre-existing dynamics of class and nationality – an experience of terrifying paralysis, confusion and collapse chronicled in The Last Cruise, an HBO short documentary released this week.
In 40 dread-filled, unsettling minutes, The Last Cruise evokes the fear and anxiety of coexisting with a then novel, amorphous, poorly understood threat through mostly cell phone footage by passengers and crew. It’s not so much a retrospective – we’re not out of the pandemic woods yet, of course – as “an origin story”, the film’s director, Hannah Olson (who also recently made Baby God), told the Guardian. By hovering tightly to the perspectives of passengers and crew, The Last Cruise revisits “the way we felt in the early days of the pandemic – the moments of dismissal, denial, fear, uncertainty, panic”.
Unlike last October’s Totally Under Control, which snap-metabolized the US government’s galling failures to contain the coronavirus from film-makers Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, Olson purposely does not include experts or epidemiologists in The Last Cruise. There’s no scientific retrospective on how the virus traveled through the ship’s air ducts, how Japanese health officials undertook a disorganized, inconsistent testing and isolation process (an untold number of passengers were never tested, and 57 people tested positive after they were released from the boat), or how various national governments managed talks rescue.
Instead, the gradual slide into a 21st century Titanic story of disaster shouldered unevenly by class plays through a verité collage of self-recorded videos escalating in desperation and fury. For vacationers, including about 400 Americans, holiday selfies and ebullient cell phone diaries curdled into grim recordings of listless days contained to a ship cabin, clogged toilets, air ducts suddenly taped over and intercom information drops whose import are made more unbelievable by the forced, chipper neutrality of the captain’s tone. While the viral threat boxed passengers in their sunlit cabins, the crew were forced into potential exposure in shared mess halls and undersea sleeping quarters, their labor necessary for the other two-thirds’ continued safety.
Olson began work on The Last Cruise from afar, as passengers remained quarantined on the ship and New York hovered in a state of denial about a virus that would eventually claim 31,000 residents. “I was watching the headlines like everybody else and seeing ‘ship quarantined in Japanese harbor, 500 cases of Covid on board’,” she recalled. She started collecting the ample social media output from those onboard, several of whom are interviewed in The Last Cruise – passengers frustrated with a limp, cold meal; crew justifiably terrified about working in shared facilities to prepare said meal without protective equipment, cramped next to coughing co-workers, left exposed by safety procedures one Japanese infectious disease expert on board later described as “completely inadequate”.
“I started wondering who gets to count as a human being?” Olson said. “Who gets to take cover in a crisis? Who gets to be in quarantine, and who has to be a human shield? That’s something I was watching play out in my own life in New York in March of last year, as I watched the rich head to their bunkers and [the term] ‘essential workers’ [was] born.”
At the same time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent representatives aboard the ship in
Hazmat suits, the US government advised against wearing or buying masks as a preventive measure; on 29 February, the US Surgeon General tweeted “Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” as they were “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” The disconnect between “what my government was telling me and what I was seeing first-hand on Facebook” drew Olson deeper into the saga, as she amassed hundreds of hours of footage.
Though she was in contact with numerous people aboard the ship, most of The Last Cruise was filmed without her direction, by everyday citizens attempting to make sense of an unknown crisis unfolding in real time, and in some crew cases, breaking employment NDAs to call for help (the final people removed from the ship, in early March, were 69 Indonesian crew members). “Just as much as it’s a film about the feelings of the early crisis, it’s also about how we narrate our lives,” said Olson, “and what happens when cell phone vacation footage or a selfie you make when you’re working becomes part of this global story, and the timing and the details matter.”
From a laymen’s perspective, “so much of the experience of the onset of this pandemic was the information vacuum”, said Olson. But “what was appalling to me making this film was how much we knew and how many lives could’ve been saved if we would’ve listened to the lessons of this ship”. The Last Cruise is a “time capsule” of what scientists and government officials knew in February thanks to observing that ill-fated cruise ship: that the virus spread through asymptomatic carriers (including the Diamond Princess’s patient zero); that widespread testing of all people, including those without symptoms, was key to quantifying the threat and containing the spread; that the virus was transmitted through the air, including through ventilation systems.
Yet it would take until 3 April for the CDC to advise Americans to wear masks, and until 27 April to recommend testing for “people without symptoms” according to state and local guidelines. By that point, the US had one million confirmed cases of Covid and 56,000 deaths – a preventable tragedy of government incompetence, scientific hubris, and infuriatingly dangerous inanity by then-President Donald Trump documented more comprehensively in Totally Under Control. “It was like a horror film that I was watching happen in the social media footage and started to compile it,” said Olson of her initial collation process in February and March, “and then this larger horror film as I’m watching these lessons be ignored.”
“The information we got from the Diamond Princess was our chance. It gave us all of the information we needed,” said Olson. The Last Cruise, like Totally Under Control, reveals once again how “the people who had the power to make changes did not listen”, she said. “And the horror that took place on the boat actually engulfs the entire world.”
The Last Cruise is now available on HBO and HBO Max with a UK release to be announced
to have bracing, faltering conversations on camera. The director does a brilliant job of recognising when her big characters are about to enact a small human drama and letting the camera soak it up.
Yet there is also a risk to being hands-off with such a complex individual story. Sometimes it feels as though the director is not fully equipped to translate what she captures for her audience and it is not clear whether Tobi could not or would not share a little more of their inner dialogue.
There were moments when it seemed as though this filmmaker might also have mistaken a complex trans person for a compelling trans story. Rather than collaborate more with Tobi to find the narrative that truly is their journey, the editing hints at more sensational ideas, such as regret and confusion. These may well be accurate or projections, added to create tension or simplicity where neither really existed.
Thiessa Woinbackk, star of the Brazilian coming-of-age drama Valentina, is a trans YouTube star and activist in her home country. She is also a formidable screen presence and another exciting discovery among this year’s Flare lineup.
The titular character is a moody and defiant, yet smart and tender teen, upon whose shoulders the universe happens to have placed the added weight of being trans. In the opening scene, when forced to out herself to a club bouncer during a night out with friends, she impatiently asserts: “That’s me five years ago,” wearing an expression that says: “Now let me in, I want to dance like everybody else.”
It is clear that she does not see herself as a victim, so nor should we. In terms of where we are in the global struggle for trans equality, this characterisation feels very real and timely. And yet, precisely because Valentina is a girl, her smalltown, conservative surroundings and the men who dominate it may yet break her spirit.
This film assuredly explores intersections of gender inequality, sexuality and societal change. It’s transness is not a crutch or a hook but rather a rubric, which it uses to ask new and surprising questions, such as, for example, Valentina in the final scene: “What is it about my freedom that bothers you?”
No Ordinary Man is trans history, one many of us assumed we would never get to see and some feared did not even exist. It is also a meta narrative in more than one way, which sounds dubious but is magnificently executed.
The life story of mid-20th century trans jazz musician Billy Tipton is told in part as straight biography, with home audio recordings and black and white photos. A full sense of the man remains elusive but the makers know this. Indeed, they are asking: why is that?
We also go, and return throughout, to a casting call for a Tipton biopic, where a diverse range of trans masculine people are auditioning for the leading role. It’s surprising and instructive in its own right to see these script readings become emotionally charged over and over again.
Lastly, by way of sociopolitical analysis and context, Tipton’s original biography – Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton – is firmly but fairly critiqued from contemporary trans perspectives. We are reminded of how absolute the “trans people are deceitful” theory was and how recently that began to change.
So, there is a lot going on and yet the documentary retains room to breathe, and to exhale in disbelief and sigh with feelings of collective grief for our hidden elders. Then, just when you think both you and the film are spent, in comes the inscrutable Billy Jr, who held his father as he died from treatable illnesses .
This is a devastating and mighty documentary. It offers us – trans or cis – vital lessons about our past and reassures us of entirely different and hopeful ways forward.
Towards the end of No Ordinary Man, the writer Thomas Page McBee says that people who are transgender “are learning to tell our own stories”. This year’s BFI Flare lineup of transled and trans-made films is promising evidence of this. But it is also a reminder that, while seeing trans actors play trans characters is powerful and necessary, it is not enough.
Empowering trans people to tell trans stories at every level is not about ticking boxes or being woke; it’s much simpler than that. It’s about unlocking great stories and making films that are as good as they can possibly be.