Not too cold

You may think you know all about the zombie genre. They’re dead, they walk about aimlessly, bumping into things, and as soon as they smell living flesh, they will not stop until they get their share of raw human meat/organs in their mouths. But have you ever seen a zombie fall head over heels in love? That’s right, here we have R (Hoult) a zombie who falls in love with Julie (Palmer), one of the very few humans on Earth after it is overtaken by the walking dead. Ha, R+J... Get it? These two star-crossed lovers have a lot of obstacles to overcome if they want to make their romance work. There is even the obligatory balcony scene.

It’s certainly an interesting spin on a genre that isn’t known for creativity. With some excellent voiceover work from Hoult, who also mastersthe American accent, it does raise intriguing questions. Here is a film that provides a humane look at zombies without immediately painting them as cold-blooded killers. They all have their own individual thoughts, they show potential to change, all in ways that seem to make some sense, relying on the audience’s tolerance level towards the “love conquers all” type of message.

Hoult, now all grown up from his About a Boy years, is a likable lead, who initially appears as a horrendous, gothic figure (look at the first picture on the right there and see if he’s quite the “Romeo” material) but in fact he successfully plays on the goofy, dim-witted side of his character with maximum comedy value. A lot of the film’s laughs come from his strange, hunched-over gait, as well as his inner thoughts.

There are some marked inconsistencies, and some not very well explained plot strands that lazily go unaddressed for the sake of getting to the nice and neat, simple ending the film has been planning for all along. And it does have the tendency tomove quite slowly throughout, somewhat similar to how the dead walk on a daily basis, although building up to a rather sizable finale.