Little Monsters (2019)

Little Monsters arrives as a 2019 Australian zombie comedy, which is to say it arrives with a machete and a smile. Abe Forsythe's screenplay concerns a washed-up musician named Dave, a kindergarten teacher named Audrey, and a children's television host named Teddy McGiggle, all of them shepherding a class of small children through a farm overrun by the undead. The premise is efficient, and the film is largely content to be a genre exercise with a warm center. There is almost no social program on offer here, and the film seems untroubled by that fact.

The most substantive item for our ledger is Lupita Nyong'o at the top of the call sheet, a Black actress headlining a horror comedy without the film making a single remark about it. That is representation by presence, not by argument, and it earns measured credit. Audrey is competent, resourceful, and the only adult who behaves like an adult, though her competence reads as character work instead of thesis. The film offers no racial commentary, no economic critique, no environmental concern, and no LGBTQ+ presence at all. The zombie outbreak originates at a testing facility, which a more earnest production would have converted into a systemic indictment. This one does not bother.

Felix's fixation on tractors and Darth Vader is childhood eccentricity, played for laughs, and the film never asks us to read it as anything else. Teddy's confession of alcoholism and sexual misbehavior lands as crude comedy, not a reckoning. The messaging, such as it is, amounts to a washed-up man learning to sing Shake It Off for the children he has been dragging through a slaughterhouse. A gentler outcome is hard to imagine. We classify it accordingly, with no small relief.