2013 zombie romance, dir. Jonathan Levine, Nicholas Hoult, Teresa
Palmer; IMDb /
allmovie. After the zombie
apocalypse, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy is still dead.
This is based on a book, but sensibly leaves out some of the
sillier elements (particularly the over-explanation of how things got
this way): all you need to know is that zombies ("Corpses"), who
eventually turn into skeletal "Bonies", have overrun the Earth, and
the surviving humans live behind a great big wall with lots of guns.
And if you think that sounds like a setup for a parody of right-wing
propaganda, you'll enjoy the scene where Julie finally comes back from
a scavenging expedition gone very wrong, and her father (John
Malkovich) is asking-not-asking what happened to her in a way that is
very clearly modelled on wanting to know whether she met a Boy while
she was lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Which, kind of…
"I mean, I know it's really hard to meet guys right now with the
apocalypse and stuff, trust me. […] But, Julie, this is weird."
Because while these zombies act like mindless killers, some at least
of them have an interior life; and when "R" (he doesn't remember the
rest of his original name) starts to make human connections, he starts
to move towards being human again. And if one zombie can do that…?
The filmmaking isn't always great; too many scenes are underlit, the
time changes from night to day in accordance with the pathetic
fallacy, and the bonies in particular are too clearly creations of the
computer rather than anything that can interact properly with the
human cast. And most seriously, there's very little genuine horror or
even gore; this film relies on the viewer's knowledge of other zombie
films to fill in the stuff that it doesn't want to show.
But there's some superb acting from Hoult, some pretty decent acting
from Palmer, and a script that allows R's interior monologues to work.
All right, the relationship starts off with a severe power imbalance,
and it would be nice to see the film acknowledge that. And perhaps the
basic conceit is stretched a bit far, and some careful cutting could
have kept the pace from sagging in the obvious places. But overall it
works.
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