Awkward: Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) shows up at the Paris flat of his ex-girlfriend (Sigrid Bouaziz) to pick up his stuff, only to find a huge party from which he hides away in a back room. Even more awkward: He wakes up the next morning to find blood-spattered chaos, and Paris overrun with zombies. Director/co-screenwriter Dominique Rocher—adapting a novel by Pit Agarmen—bypasses horror-thriller action almost entirely, aside from a nifty idea suggesting the hive-like zombies are pacified by smoke just like bees are. Mostly, it’s a story of trying to preserve humanity when it would be understandable to descend into sheer self-preservation—and at this moment in history, it’s almost heartbreaking watching Danielsen Lie treat a dead body with respect, or develop something akin to a friendship with the walking-dead guy (Denis Lavant) trapped in his building’s elevator. Sam’s character might have been richer with more time spent on who he was before the apocalypse, and there’s not so much an ending here as a dead stop. There’s still a profound power in considering what it is that makes us better than shambling, unthinking beasts.
By
Scott Renshaw