Once, the zombie epidemic movie was simply a horror film sub-genre. Now, flesh-eating ghouls shamble and gnaw through pop culture from mainstream studio pictures (Zombieland, World War Z) to TV soaps (The Walking Dead), game-derived franchises (Resident Evil) to micro-budgeted efforts shot in folks’ gardens (Colin, made for just £45). They make zombie movies for every mood, ranging from knockabout gore comedy to low-key art cinema.
More upsetting than scary, it ratchets up the tension unsettlingly.
Written and directed by David Freyne, this Irish drama falls into the grim, intense and earnest category. Its plague variant (the ‘Maze’ virus) turns victims into feral homicidal maniacs, and gives the authorities an excuse to impose brutal martial law. Like Romero and other canny, socially conscious genre filmmakers, Freyne uses the premise to chew over gristly human problems rather than just fire off guns and tuck into steaming brains.
It’s one of a clutch of stories — the Disney musical Zombies, the Spanish-Canadian The Returned and the BBC series In The Flesh — set after the kind of outbreak seen in most zombie movies. The drama rises when infectees whose condition has been cured try to get along with people who remember them roaming around biting friends and neighbours.
The parallels between this science- fiction near-future and Ireland’s recent past are inescapable: angry protesters in the streets, anti-Cured graffiti and vigilante groups, a militant Cured faction eager to kick the violence off again, casual prejudice and uncaring authorities. Senan (Sam Keeley), tormented by nightmares of his drooling murderous former self, is let out of a grim government containment facility to return to the family home, vouched for by his sister-in-law Abbie (Ellen Page) — an American journalist whose Irish-born son would be refused entry to the US thanks to all-too-credible quarantine restrictions. Senan can’t tell Abbie he knows how his brother died — a ticking plot bombshell primed to go off before the inevitable last-reel chaotic uprising.
Keeley and Page are low-key and introspective, but the slow-burning, doomy tale is enlivened by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s standout work as a memorable villain — Conor, a one-time barrister/politician who doesn’t have nightmares about horrors he perpetrated. This seething Cured resents the loss of his former position in human society (he has to work as a cleaner), and might well see a way to regain his terrible power. His surly sneakiness works as a burning fuse for the plot explosions that duly come along in the third act because, for all
the sociopolitical parallels, this is still a zombie movie, after all.