Summary:
In zombie-ridden Australia, a father searches for someone to protect his infant daughter.
My Thoughts:
In high school I was a huge fan of zombie movies, so much so that my girlfriend at the time got me a book that listed all the zombie movies in existence through the early 2000s. I feel like zombie movies (or horror movies in general) are a huge draw for budding filmmakers because it’s easy to make a somewhat decent zombie short on a low budget with limited setting and untrained actors (it can’t be that hard to act braindead), and this film feels, in a lot of ways, like the two directors, Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, are just trying to get their feet in the door so they can be part of the Hollywood machine (which isn’t a bad thing). This film is based on a seven minute short film of the same name, directed and written by the same directors; my biggest problem with this film is that it just feels like a short film that’s been stretched to an hour-and-forty-five minutes, which it is.
The themes and the set up are the best part of this film. The movie starts with Andy (Martin Freeman, “Ghost Stories”) and his wife Kay (Susie Porter, “Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones”) are afloat on a boat just off the coast of Australia, with their infant child Rosy. Within the first ten minutes, a zombie bites Kay. Knowing what is in store, she sets a timer for forty-eight hours (the average transition period), and soon symptoms begin to set in. Andy is forced to look after his daughter by himself, but after he is bitten, he knows that he has to find someone else to look after her. In my opinion, this is the most interesting part of the film because, though zombie films are superfluous, this gives us something that hasn’t been done a billion times before. From the very beginning, we realize that our protagonist isn’t going to make it out of this alive, but he’s trying to ensure a future for his daughter . I sort of liked this hopeless/hopeful plotting; knowing that there’s an existential crisis constantly hanging over our character makes him a bit more interesting. (“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”)
The biggest problem I had with this film was the pacing and length after he begins looking for someone to look after his child. Whereas Kay’s transition into zombiedom takes all of ten minutes of the runtime, Andy’s transition and his journey to find someone to look after Rosy takes up almost the rest of the film; it feels incredibly uneven, as if they sort of just waited around for Kate to die before Andy decided to do anything; I suppose it’s his wife (and his life) he can do what he wants, but non-action during a zombie apocalypse seems ill-advised.
After Andy makes it to shore and starts making contact with the survivors, some Aboriginal, some Australian (What do you call non-native Australians? British-Australians/ European-Australians? I think we’re just going to go with Australian), the film sort of just falls into patterns we’ve seen in tons of zombie movies before. Andy struggles to find ‘good survivors’ who will take care of his daughter when he’s gone, but he does so without much sense of urgency, and that really takes away from the overall tension the film is trying to build. There’s a scene shortly after he lands on shore where he comes into contact with a woman who realizes Andy has been bitten, and after she asks him to have a drink, she broaches the subject of how long he’s got before the wound takes hold, and he responds, quite casually, that he has “Forty-six hours left; give or take.” I don’t know about you, but if I had a daughter and I was trying to ensure her safety, I wouldn’t be all casual about trying to find a caretaker; I’d be pretty manic.
Verdict:
This film is competently made enough, which is why I’ve given it a passing score, but if you’ve seen any post-apocalyptic or zombie flick ever, then all of the themes the film touches on and things that Andy wrestles with, will feel pretty well-worn. While I appreciated some of the things this film did, and I can appreciate Freeman’s performance, I can’t honestly say I’d ever recommend it or go out of my way to watch it again; it’s a perfectly middling zombie flicks, and when a genre is as overcrowded as the zombie genre, you don’t really have to settle for middling. Try “Night of the Living Dead” or “Day of the Dead” if you want a classic, “28 Days Later” or “Rec” if you want something pretty scary, “Shaun of the Dead” or “Fido” you want something funny, “Train to Busan” or “Dead Snow” if you want something foreign, and “Planet Terror” or “One Cut of the Dead” if you want something ridiculous; there are hundreds of zombie films, and this one doesn’t do a ton to stand out from the rest of the rabble.
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