Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man ruefully getting by in an America yet again afflicted by the walking dead; for once, a movie in which he’s the person least likely to say: “I’ll be back.” But this is a zombie story less about sudden scares than about emotional notes, for Schwarzenegger’s character has a daughter (Abigail Breslin) who’s been bitten and is fated to turn “necroambulist”, as the clinical term has it here.
An enterprisingly low-key debut by British title sequence designer Henry Hobson, Maggie conjures up a world that has turned an acrid blend of grey and sepia; the grim lyricism suggests a profoundly depressed Terrence Malick. As a tragedy of teenage terminal illness, Maggie belongs less in the horror cycle than with those stories of premature death (eg The Fault in Our Stars) that are the latter-day version of 19th-century tubercular romance, and it hits notes of pathos more often than it achieves genuine poignancy. But Breslin is affecting as the ordinary young woman beneath the festering flesh, while Arnie shows a delicacy you’d never have suspected, at least not from his current TV ads with meerkats.
