Productions made in an unashamedly genre-centric spirit – such as the New Zealand zombie movie Forgive Us All – have licence to be many things: loud, silly, trope-filled, marinated in gore and splatter. But they should never be boring.
Despite handsome cinematography and picturesque settings, writer-director Jordana Stott’s feature debut doesn’t pass this acid test: it’s dreary and monotonous, as if the terrible virus infecting its post-apocalyptic world has seeped into the movie itself, draining it of life and vitality. Stott clearly intended this to be a “serious” and intensely atmospheric work rather than a splatterific midnight movie. But high art it ain’t, and her heavy-handed approach only sucks any potential fun out of it.
The film is led by an intensely morose performance from Lily Sullivan as Rory, a grief-stricken survivor living in a shack in the back of beyond with a man named Otto, played by the great Australian actor Richard Roxburgh with a bafflingly weird accent. It is part Aussie, but then your guess is as good as mine: maybe Irish? Scottish?
The pair have been hiding in this lovely neck of the woods (in real life, the Queenstown Lakes District on New Zealand’s South Island) away from a presumably tumultuous wider world, which we never see. We do witness the moment Rory’s daughter Matty (Bonnie Filer) turns into a zombie and attacks her mum, in scenes that establish both some emotional stakes and the film’s allergy to nuance. Whenever I see a child zombie attack a parent – admittedly not a daily occurrence – my mind recalls an exquisitely great line from the Australian zombie movie Undead: “When I was a kid we respected our parents, we didn’t fuckin’ eat them.”
Forgive Us All jumps ahead four years and introduces Noah (Lance Giles), an escapee from a government camp where non-infected people are confined. Rory takes the injured man home, a MacGuffin that will upend her relatively stable existence by summoning the arrival of government agents, including the cattle prod-wielding Logan (Callan Mulvey) and beret-wearing Scout (Bree Peters).
It’s a little hard to believe Rory would risk everything to help a person she has never met, in a world filled with desperate people, though it is made very clear that Rory views this act of kindness as a way to assuage her guilt and atone for past mistakes.
This is one of those movies that doesn’t mention the “z” word, as if doing so would betray its true genre colours. But it’s clear its visual and narrative ideas have been cribbed from countless other productions, with seemingly no desire to rewrite the playbook or bring any freshness. While it’s admittedly hard to innovate in such a well-trodden space, the monsters here feel as if they’ve rolled off the assembly line.
The worst moments are those deemed to be emotionally significant. One very cloying flashback scene, for instance, sees Rory and Matty discuss her wish “for dad to come home”, while a storm rages outside and sorrowful music swells for extra dramatic oomph. This moment feels stilted and over-egged, even before dad – looking rather worse for wear – does indeed come home, triggering another narratively convenient transformation scene.
There’s lots of silence in this film; many scenes unfold with little or no dialogue, the camera gently moving around and soaking up the pretty surroundings. Cinematographer Peter McCaffrey (who shot M3gan) brings a stately, orangey aesthetic, tinted as if the frame has been slathered in mustard then left out in the sun to dry. The sight of zombies staggering through beautiful natural backdrops has been done before (in countless episodes of The Walking Dead, for instance) but there’s something to be said for this combination of eye-watering natural beauty and blood-caked revenants.
This enhances Forgive Us All a little, but not enough; solemnity does not mean substance, and the film never stirs from its stupor.
Forgive Us All is on Netflix in Australia now, Prime Video in the US and will screen at Grimmfest 2025 in the UK on 11 October.
