Disease has long been one of the many metaphors at the zombie
movie’s disposal. They come freighted with plague imagery, and with concepts of
sickness, infection, and contagion as core elements of plot progression.
There’s often a scene in a zombie movie in which a healthy character is bitten,
giving the other characters and the audience some queasy suspense as we wonder
whether someone will kill their infected friend before full zombification takes
effect. That’s the core sick pit of dread in Maggie, a new zombie feature that’s the directorial debut of
graphic designer Henry Hobson. Working from a screenplay by John Scott 3,
Hobson makes a disease-of-the-week picture out of horror materials, treating a
zombie plague as a Black Death sweeping the country. The healthy hole up in
their houses, praying the curse doesn’t visit their doors, forcing them to
watch their loved ones turn zombie before their eyes.
The focus is on a farmer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his
wife (Joely Richardson) whose teenaged daughter (Abigail Breslin) is in the
hospital. She’s been diagnosed as infected with the zombie bug and given two
weeks before her skin starts to decay and her cannibalistic appetite kicks in.
What follows is not what one would expect from hearing Schwarzenegger is
starring in a film about zombies. There’s no muscle-bound fight for a cure
here. Instead, the girl is released home, where her family must watch her
slowly succumb to her fate, and take her to be put down once she’s a monster.
They know there will soon come a day when their daughter would mindlessly eat
them. But until that day, they will enjoy the time they have left with her.
There’s an inevitability to this film’s progression, a slow,
somber affair. It’s a gloomy movie, glum with distended dread as it stretches
one familiar zombie moment to just under 90 minutes. The film is shot in dreary
light, Lukas Ettlin’s cinematography always catching the sun in the process of
rising or falling, with little direct illumination, especially in dusty
farmhouse interiors. A deathly pall hangs over the proceedings, the atmosphere
heavy with unspoken sadness, as if the family were starting to mourn even while
trying to cling to their daughter’s presence. It’s a deathbed vigil with the
added suspense of knowing the disease won’t just take their loved one. It’ll
make her dangerous for everyone around.
Throughout are other zombie encounters haunting and
startling, like one involving a little girl with hollow eyes and a filthy white
dress slowly emerging from the forest, deeply unsettling and unspeakably sad.
But the center of attention remains the family unit. Schwarzenegger, pushing
70, has aged into less of an action hero, but more of an actor. Always a
formidable screen presence, he’s now able to rest his weathered face in a frown
of pathos, here playing a character beaten down by an apocalyptic scenario
that’s left crops burning and cars crumpled, and now threatens to take his
daughter, too. Breslin plays her with a flat teenage affect made fragile by a
death sentence, trying desperately to stay human, but also not getting her
hopes up. Receiving a zombie diagnosis can’t be easy, but it’s a lot harder in Maggie’s world, where the transformation
is in agonizing slow motion.
I wish this movie had more complications. It’s all so
drearily straightforward, a clear line from point A to point B without any
interesting detours along the way. Its commitment to one stifling mood,
presented without variation in increasingly agonizingly long minutes, is a bit
overdone. But Hobson’s command of tone and confidence in allowing his actors to
carry potentially laughable material with total sincerity is admirable. He
takes one of the key thrills of both zombie movies and Schwarzenegger actioners
– the kills – and turns it into the most dreadfully sorrowful outcome.
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