A young girl sits counting in her cell. Suddenly an alarm sounds and the lights come on. Armed soldiers come calling. Though she can walk she sits down in a wheelchair. The soldiers strap her arms and legs down and her head so she cannot turn it. She is wheeled into a classroom with numerous other children likewise strapped to wheelchairs.
Soldiers look in on the classroom calling the kids names like “freaks” and “abortions.” Their teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) is the only adult who is kind to them. In a moment of grace, she touches the girl’s head. Immediately, the soldiers, led by Sergeant Parks (Paddy Considine) come in and chastise Helen for touching a student. He then spits on his hand and pushes it under one of the children’s nose.
Immediately, the kids go feral, writing in their wheelchairs and attempting to bite the soldiers. They are zombies. Or more correctly, they are zombie hybrids. They will attack with fury when they smell humans, but can also talk and think like normal people.
They may also be the key to a cure. The zombies in this film were caused by some sort of fungus that grows inside the brain. These kids were In Utero when the virus first came about (the film occurs some ten years after the beginning of the apocalypse). They absorbed the virus when their mothers got it which may have caused them to be…well not immune as they are definitely hungry for human flesh, but special. The scientists, led by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) think this specialness may lead them to a cure.
I feel like I’m getting bogged down in the plot, but really what I’ve just described happens in the first ten minutes or so. But it is such an interesting setup for a zombie movie I wanted to dig into it a bit.
All of that occurs at a well-guarded military base, but just after those events, it is attacked by hundreds of zombies and overcome. Our heroes narrowly escape and the rest of the film finds them traveling into London in hopes of rescue.
That girl I mentioned is named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), she is smart chatty, inquisitive, and kind. In the time we spend with her on the base, she always says hello to the military people even when they are cruel to her. She always asked a lot of questions and was the top student in her class. This both endears her to her capturers and ingratiates them.
The look and feel of the film has a lot in common with the recent television series The Last of Us (the series came out in 2023 but was based on a game from 2014 game – the book this film was based on also came out in 2014 so I’ll let you be the judge of who created this look first). The landscapes are overgrown with vegetation while the city buildings and infrastructure are beginning to collapse. This creates a beautiful yet eery look to everything.
The plot is your basic quest scenario but it is well done. This type of movie often will involve a child but they are usually just there to add a sense of danger. Melanie is something different. Because she is a zombie the other do not sense her as food. She is safe from them. But when she gets hungry she is a force of danger. Yet she is also the human’s only hope. That makes the plot more interesting than your standard zombie fare.
This all worked for me quite well. I dug the the look of the film, the action scenarios, and all of the characters. If you like zombie films I highly recommend this one. It also has a fantastic ending.
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