This is Not a Test (2025)

Relying and riffing heavily on the George Romero films, and those he spawned, THIS IS NOT A TEST is the story of a young woman who ends up hiding the local high school when the zombie apocalypse strikes. She's not sure what she wants to live after experiencing a bad break up right before the world went to hell.

Feeling like a riff on DAWN OF THE DEAD with the cast locked in school instead of a shopping mall, it tries to change things up by giving us a drama of a doomed society where the lead character doesn't really want to go on. Its a soap opera in a horror package. Which is kind of weird since the film doesn't really want to be a horror film but an examination of humanity under a time of stress. 

The problem here is that like too many zombie films that want to be more, the McGuffin of the zombie apocalypse doesn't really work. Part of it is the inclusion is there simply there to move the plot along at a certain clip. By having zombies, the characters can be moved along or removed at the appropriate time.  The bigger problem is that like too many films of genre the infection and the zombie behavior zero sense on its own terms. It cribs the Romero rules to make things easier for them not to fully explain the world, but at the same time by not explaining the world, everything feels fake. I kept wanting to stop the film to ask questions about why and how. Worse the zombies are an intrusion into the discussions of humanity. The spell of the story was broken over and over again, so I never connected to the human story. Everytime they are focusing on the human story, which is what the filmmakers really want to focus on, the zombies ended up front and center.

I know this is based on a novel, and I'm kind of curious if it works better on the page where it could take its own time to build the chracters and the situations. As it stands now it's an okay film where I applaud what its trying to do more than what it actually achieves.