Director: Jordana Stott
Year: 2025
Country: New Zealand
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
Living in a post-apocalyptic world, a woman who lives on the land her former family built struggles to survive alongside her father-in-law until a mysterious stranger arrives, being chased by a horde of guards looking for the stolen cure to a zombie plague sweeping the country.
Review:
Overall, this is an abysmally dull and lifeless genre effort. Most of the few positives on display here go to the film’s inclusion and presence of the cannibalistic zombies that take place here. The creatures are extremely fun in their brief moments, working with rabid ferocity and speed through the woods as they arrive to attack and devour anyone they come across in just a few brief, isolated scenes, rampaging through the area, grabbing whoever they can. This comes about with the great action beforehand involving the brawling done by the humans to stop the other or the race to get away from the creatures as well, and with it all featuring some decent gore gags and the fun zombie make-up to make them look feral and unhinged, the zombies are pretty fun overall. As well, the premise holds potential to be enjoyable with a great setup, and the premise has potential due to the strong possibility of a bond to be explored involving the mother and father-in-law bonding over what to do in the situation they find themselves in, but that's about it.
Outside of that, there’s just nothing of interest in what’s going on. The main storyline here is the biggest issue, with no build-up to anything, and it comes across so scattershot that it lacks any kind of emotional investment in what’s going on. The series of interactions between the hunters looking for the stranger in the woods makes no sense without any kind of context for who they are, what they’re looking at, or anything else, since the world-building here is abysmal. Supposedly in a post-apocalyptic world but with everything looking like a Western landscape, this type of environment is confusing without anything bridging what’s going on and how it all happened, so this leaves everything to be done with little emotional investment or care. It’s all so uninteresting as well, with the lifestyle not being all that worthwhile and dull on top of things, since nothing happens. All the abovementioned zombie action is at the end, with the rest of the film focused on other measures rather than the beginning, so they come out of nowhere and leave the first half so sluggish and dull it’s hard to care. These overall keep the film down.
Overview: */5
A generally disappointing and not that worthwhile of a feature, there’s so little to this one that’s worthwhile makes for a rather unremarkable effort with only a few factors keeping it from the bottom of the pile. Only go for this one if you’re a diehard fan of the concept at play here, while most others out there should heed extreme caution, if not outright avoid.
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