Movie Review Whats Left Of Us

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2016 – Spoiler alerts From online reviews I have read since watching the film, this terrific and critically acclaimed Argentinian horror movie tends to disappoint Western audiences through no fault of its own. The problem is that it is hyped even on the DVD box as one of the greatest zombie movies ever made. This tends to lead people to expect grand rather tired formulaic spectacle as a dwindling band of survivors are chased, trapped and picked off one by one by an ever expanding zombie horde and the last few characters left alive either reach sanctuary or perish in the final bite. What’s Left Of Us is not that movie. It is really about what happens next. It has a cast of four, only one of who is a zombie. It is set entirely in one house, and could actually make for a very good stage play. Three young people, two men and a woman, have found their sanctuary. We don’t know how the zombie holocaust started, how these three met or how they found the house they have effectively zombie proofed. They do have to go out to forage for food supplies in pairs leaving one of the trio to guard the house alone. Sometimes they hear groans and pounding on the steel door but we have no idea if that is one or a thousand zombies passing by or actively trying to get in. Flies do get in, and the sense of pervading rot and decay permeates everything. Sometimes the men fire a rifle from the roof or through the front door key hole. We do not know what they hit if anything. At one point, one of the men, alone in the house, hears an unseen and unidentified terrified woman outside screaming for help and begging him to let her in as she is surrounded. He fires the rifle at her or the zombie / zombies closing in on her and we don’t know if she fled or got hit or got bit. She is not referenced again. Sometimes the girl hears echoing shooting in the streets as her friends tackle some unseen opponent but as the noise cannot be pinpointed she can do nothing to help. In the house, the trio get drunk, play board games and keep a secret video diary. Using video equipment left by the properties previous occupants, each of the three makes video confession of their fears, and feeling for each other, with strict orders to lock the films away in a steel box. It gets uncannily like the Big Brother reality TV video diary room, especially as one of the men breaks the cardinal rules and watches the footage made by the others, realizing they are in a loving relationship to which he is excluded. He begins disregarding the rules, to the board games and to the house’s strictly management routines too. After a drunken game or truth or dare leads to a dare to catch a zombie and bring it into the house as a pet a young zombie man is captured and chained up in the flat. One of the men uses it as a punch bag. The girl tries without success to communicate with it. As their carefully balanced rules are bent and broken like those in Animal Farm, the trio of humans begin to feel alienated from one another, leading to tragedy, though not in the way the viewer might expect. This isn’t really a traditional zombie movie, but a study of toxic boredom, where a near utopian simply organized sanctuary is destroyed from within by exposed secrets and the erosion of privacy. In many ways this is more Sartre’s No Exit than a George Romero blood-fest. Sadly, the hype promotes it as the latter. Seen for what it is without such preconceptions and you will see it for what it is, a far more realistic horror movie, where the scary is a mix of the unseen and what we ourselves are really like when the truth comes out. Arthur Chappell