Day Zero
It’s been 55 years since George Romero introduced the modern zombie movie with “Night of the Living Dead,” and it’s easy to see why it’s become a fairly popular genre structure to follow. The smartest thing Romero did in that first film was to make it into a morality play, pitting several characters, and their disparate personalities, against one another when faced with a neverending sea of death. The gore is what gets genre fans into the theatre, but the tension between characters is what keeps us watching. It feels like a simple premise to get right, but you also need to bring something unique to it to hold our attention. “Day Zero” gets the premise right, I think, but that something unique feels elusive.
This Filipino entry in the zombie genre stars Brandon Vera as Emon, a former Special Forces soldier who’s spent the past 8 years in prison. He has maintained an incident-free prison sentence, and he is ready to be released. As he gets released, however, the world is overrun by a deadly virus that keeps those who are infected alive in a violent, feral form. Can Emon get home to save the wife and daughter he left behind? Can he keep them safe when he does?
The hook in this film is Emon’s mission, and the challenges he faces along the way. That’s a good, survival movie hook, and at 82 minutes, Vera is engaging enough a performer- especially when he gets to the character’s wife and daughter- to grab us until the end; on the screenplay front, Ays De Guzman delivers what is required, and the actors manage to get some feeling out of this story. As for the director, Joey De Guzman, he keeps the action moving, but the film’s visual look is ugly in a way that makes it feel like a lot of other low-budget zombie movies that want to feel gritty and intense. He knows how to stage the gore well, and he gets a lot of mileage out of his lead and the story, but the visual style just didn’t do much for me in this case. Not every zombie movie has to start off like the apocalypse already took place- especially given the title is “Day Zero,” the implication is that we’re watching the beginnings of the apocalypse as we watch this movie.
Even if the film didn’t hook me the same way the best zombie movies do, I will say that its lead, Brandon Vera, very much did. The way he and Mary Jean Lastimosa (as his wife, Sheryl) and Freya Fury Montierro (as his daughter, Jane) bond as a family grabbed me, and kept me rolling with this film even as it hit every trope in the zombie genre playbook. If for no other reason, “Day Zero” is worth checking out for that.
