Surprise! You're undead!

Rating: Null/10 (1 November 2004)

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I went in expecting a cheesy remake of a cheesy splatter flick, thinking it would be good for a laugh if nothing else. Instead, I found myself watching a well-cast, well-written, and surprisingly well-made black comedy/thriller.
On the surface, it sounds like a horrendous cliché. A mysterious plague breaks out and begins to sweep across America, turning those it kills into screaming cannibal zombies. In one afflicted city, a mismatched group of survivors take refuge in an abandoned suburban shopping mall. With the zombies thronging in the streets outside, they watch the situation get worse and worse on the TV news, and try to figure out a means of escape while trying to avoid killing each other in the meantime.
So what makes it work? Well, several things. While the premise may be a cliché in itself, the script steers well clear of them. The walking dead aside, the whole thing's pulled off with a decent degree of realism. The story proceeds in a believable way, without resorting to ¡°shock-horror¡±twists or climactic plot devices. You can tell in advance what's going to happen with the pregnant girl, for example, or the old woman with the bite on her arm, but the enjoyment comes from watching events unfold, rather than having them suddenly sprung on you. It¡¯s a different way to tell this kind of story, and it works.
The screenplay also dispenses with the baggage that usually accompanies a horror movie. For example, it doesn't bother to explain where the zombie virus came from, because... who cares? Most of us are familiar with the concept of flesh-eating zombies, and can accept the idea without wasting any screen time giving us clever reasons for them to exist. The same brevity of information is employed with the characters ¨C we don't know any more about them than they know about each other, because we don¡¯t need to. This is not the kind of film where in-depth character development is necessary. There are a couple of budding romances but no deep romantic dramas, and although there's a lot of bonding, there's no overnight journeys of self-discovery ¨C the arrogant yuppie is still an arrogant yuppie at the end, just as the hardboiled cop is still a hardboiled cop. Nor is there a ¡°core¡± group of characters as such. Anna the nurse (Sarah Polley) is the closest thing the story has to a central protagonist, but it's really a true ensemble piece with characters coming and going as new refugees arrive at the mall, or fall ¨C one way or another ¨C to the undead.
If I have a gripe, it's that the characters do seem to get over their trauma pretty quickly. They know that the city's overrun with zombies and their families are dead, but ¨C aside from a brief bit of crying here and there ¨C nobody seems terribly fraught with grief and they all have a surprisingly pragmatic approach to the whole situation.
One point I must make ¨C this movie deserves an award for the credits alone. The opening sequence tells the ¡°big story¡± through newsreels and footage which show the gradual disintegration of society as the zombie plague sweeps the country. But it's the closing credits ¨C where the final chapter of the tale unfolds via a series of brief, flickering images on a camcorder ¨C that had me almost applauding at the end. Pure genius.