Warm movie!

Rating: 9/10 (1 October 2013)

Julie and ''R' are star-crossed lovers (yep, there's even a balcony scene). He's a member of the living dead and she's the daughter of the head honcho responsible for what's left of the post-apocalyptic human world. Wandering alone through an airport, R has been left with a tiny pilot light of humanity left in his corpse, making him capable of thought and feeling. And his feeling is mostly lonely. He meets his Juliet while she is raiding for supplies and the pilot light ignites. Overcoming his zombie urge to eat her up, R saves her and starts his road to redemption, dragging the rest of man-, and zombie-kind, with him. Monster movies are never really about the monsters. They're about humans, the nature of humanity and our flawed and/or triumphant responses to what is unknown or different. Warm Bodies spells that out for us as R and a growing number of the undead start to exhume themselves and it's the warm-blooded, in particular John Malkovich as the broken father, and father- figure, who have to de-monsterfy themselves. Anchored by strong performances from its two young leads, Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer (as well as a nice turn by Rob Coddry as R's wing-man), Warm Bodies is funny and sweet. It's pretty low on the splatter-factor for a zombie film, and a few of the sfx and make-up components could have been better but ultimately this is zombie dystopia on a very intimate scale, so no huge foul there. There's also a bit of imagery at the end that I found heavy-handed - the message had already been well-made. Rushing to judgement, putting up walls, closing ourselves down - these might all be ways of protecting ourselves, but they also close us off to possibilities. The redemptive power of love and kindness is the theme sustaining Warm Bodies and it manages to only tip the cheese-meter a little bit in its delivery, making for genuinely enjoyable viewing.