Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End (2024)

Here we have a Spanish zombie thriller adapted from Manel Loureiro's novel, in which a depressed lawyer named Manel survives a rabies-like pandemic in Galicia with his cat, a speargun, and a diving suit. The film is competent, gloomy, and entirely uninterested in instructing its audience about anything. It wants to show us a man barricading a door and then, later, a man rowing an inflatable dinghy past some unfriendly sailors. These are honorable ambitions and the film meets them without ceremony.

The cast is Iberian and the story is set in Spain, which is simply where the story happens. A Ukrainian firefighting pilot named Viktor Pritchenko turns up among the Russian crew, and his presence is motivated by the plot's need for a morally conflicted ally, not by any casting directive. Women appear as a dead wife, a worried sister, a suicidal wheelchair-using neighbor, a nurse, and a nun who is infected and left behind. They are defined by their proximity to Manel or by their function as casualties, and the film advances no thesis about any of it. Manel owns a solar power company, a biographical detail mentioned once and never developed into a sermon about the planet. The antagonists are ragged, armed sailors stealing from refugees, which is a critique of desperation, not of capital.

There is no racial commentary, no queer presence, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent character, and no revision of history. The zombies are zombies. Bloody Disgusting observed that the film makes no commentary on the genre itself, which is the most glowing endorsement of restraint available in this line of work. The result is a modest, well-performed survival picture that preaches nothing and asks only that we watch a man and his cat flee a hospital. We have classified it accordingly, with a certain professional relief. Four paragraphs would be too many for a film this incurious about its own significance.