I saw this move as a double feature a few weeks ago with Is This Thing On? and the only thing I had heard about it was basically that there’s some sound in the movie that is absolutely gruesome. This was in the backdrop of some rave reviews for the long-simmering sequel to 28 Days Later which was followed up by a much ignored and apparently bad 28 Weeks Later before someone meditated, called their mom, and–I assume because, for reasons that will become apparent, I probably will never see these movies–handed Ralph Fiennes a boatload of cash and asked him to dance in back-to-back movies while also humanizing the monsters of the series.
Which is to say, I think everyone has an entry point into zombies as a genre of horror, and then somewhere in the early 2010s we pivoted to zombies as a template for storytelling. I Am Legend is more of the survivalist flavor with the Will They Kill the Dog hovering over the movie, while World War Z is the gritty, globe-trotting Sad Dad zombie story. Sad Dad stories are Serious and Important and usually have some commentary about cooperation and the power of the human spirit when backed up by machine guns. Shaun of the Dead from 2004, one of Edgar Wright’s cringey earnest movies about addiction wrapped up in a slow-moving narrative about the apocalypse also falls into this category of Early Sad Dad.
Zombie comedies were a rite of passage for young actors in the 2010s in the same way that doing an erotic thriller is for up and comers of the 2020s, with Warm Bodies (2013, which isn’t so much about zombies as it’s about angsty cis love stories), Zombieland in 2009 (sort of a degraded retread of a character from Adventureland WHICH CAME OUT IN THE SAME YEAR–I should also mention here that Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are still friends fifteen years later and recently interviewed each other about being directors, so cute!), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2016 for Lily James, which is also the same year that Train to Busan (another classic Sad Dad zombie movie but this time Korean) debuts, or Little Monsters (2019) for Lupita Nyongo (still one of my all time favorites, which I saw for the first time during the pandemic at a Halloween movie festival at the Capitol Drive In). Zombie Musicals like Anna and the Apocalypse (2018, also a pandemic-induced find) and the great made-for-tv Disney franchise Zombies (2019) demonstrate the mutability of the genre and why it’s so difficult to put these monsters into a box and affix a cohesive set of rules and aesthetics. The Dead Don’t Die (2019), another droll Sad Dad zombie flick from a few years ago shows how much there’s an appetite for basically a zombie movie every season of the year without risk of oversaturation.
One goes into a zombie moving with a few questions like how fast are they gonna run? are they gonna be “sick” or sickkkkk? And, I guess, more recently, how big those dicks gonna get? But something about Daisy Ridley’s presence made it seem like this probably wasn’t going to be those things. Ridley is in fact such a chameleon in her roles, in a way that’s very reminiscent of Mark Hamill’s ability to shapeshift after the success of his own franchise in the 70s without losing relevance or falling into a type cast. I’ll give up most of the premise here and then slide into some spoilers: the Americans have cocked up something bad off the coast of Tasmania with a superweapon that EMP-shockwaved human brains over the entire island and everyone is dead. There’s a massive national effort afoot to recover and bury the bodies of the victims (enter Ridley, whose fiance was caught in the disaster). We learn during the world’s worst orientation that some victims have been known to “come back online” but rest assured they are NOT AGGRESSIVE. So, the movie has the pleasant novelty of giving us the apocalypse lite. There are cell phones and raves and young people volunteering so that they can make a difference while also doing sex and drugs in abandoned hotels and stuff. It’s the apocalypse on a small scale, with space for joy and camaraderie. Ridley finds a work bestie and they engage in montages of clearing houses before finding their first sundowner.
The thing about this movie is that there are no jump scares. There’s not really even a body count. This isn’t a movie for people who are looking to lop off the heads of brain eaters. It’s a roadtrip movie. It’s a break-up movie. The soundtrack is fabulous: opens with Kid Cudi song and ends with Metric’s Eat Me Alive. Everything about this vibe is Sad Dad vibes and that feels like it was a tone set for 2026. It also made me so disappointed when I went and saw an actual movie about a Sad Dad. Next up, Is This Thing On.
