What We Become

What a shame. I had hoped for a good Danish horror film, but this did not deliver. It started promising with a great cold opening only to immediately ruin this by having its title screen actually be a try-hard, epilepsy-inducing jump scare. The juxtaposition between these two clips left me confused as to what tone the film was trying to establish. It did not improve when it became apparent that the main character of the film was not the one featured in this opening but was instead going to be a poorly written and poorly acted teenage boy, who (of course?) needs to have his own romance with the neighbor's teenage daughter so that we can have sex scenes with her and show her off as much as possible without leaving PG-territory. One may wonder why they bothered to have a poorly executed teenage romance in a zombie flick, but I guess they had it because they barely got any zombies. The zombies doesn't show up until the last 10 minutes of this 1 hour and 17 minutes-long film, actually. I assume they tried to build tension, but that doesn't work because we already know how zombies generally look like. I actually think it's more likely that they just didn't have a big enough budget for makeup to have zombies throughout. Also, I have a problem with them waiting so long to reveal zombies as I believe you can go about presenting your zombie story in one of two ways: either you start the story already being post the zombie apocalypse or you show the turn in full during the first 5-20 minutes or first act. This film is a miracle: it spends the entirety of it's runtime making its transition opposed to get it out of the way because it needs time for the teenage romance. The reason to why you get the transition to zombie apocalypse done relatively quickly is to show it as a natural disaster that cannot be stopped, as if it's interrupting the plot of the film itself. It may slowly build in the background until it infests the film completely. A film turning into a zombie film is meant to simulate the turn that happens to people becoming zombies. If you go slowly about this as they decided to do you fail at providing immediacy. This is the first problem while the second is that building up to showing zombies throughout the film puts too much emphasis on their presence. In a zombie film, zombies are not supposed to be the main focus of horror: while zombies are predictable and run on instincts, humans in critical situations are completely unpredictable. We know what happens if a zombie gets close to our main characters, but not what will happen if other humans gets close - will they be friendly or hostile? You focus on this relationship to ask how humans would react in stressed conditions. The zombies should function as a spectacle and constant reminder of danger to our characters, but we should be invested in the well-being of our main characters first in order for us to care. Done correctly, you can have your audience hooked whether type of media your zombie story appears as. I would even go as far to say you don't need zombies as movies like It Comes at Night proved to me. However, given the stale acting, the misguided understanding of our care in whether or not the unlikable teenager gets rewarded for his perverted interested in the teenage girl and the ridiculous cliches throughout (just because you are the first Danish zombie film it doesn't give you carte blanche at the buffet), this film failed at engaging me. You are not supposed to root for the death of your characters, as this film had me do. The Japanese proved that it's possible to make a fantastic zombie flick with a low budget with One Cut of the Dead, so it should be possible for Danes as well in time. This film provides nothing new to the table and fails at entertaining as intended.