Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)
Directed by John McPhail
Viewed in Theatre
Some of you may be wondering, “What the hell is Anna and the Apocalypse, I’ve never heard of it?” That is a perfectly good question, because frankly I hadn’t heard of it until days before it came to a theatre near me, and even then it’s only because I follow people on Twitter who talk about horror movies. I saw no posters at the movie theatre I go to regularly, no trailers or anything to let me know it was coming, it just arrived one day! I guess I can’t be too surprised about that, given that this movie may not have the most cross genre appeal given that this is a Scottish Christmas Zombie Musical, perhaps the first film in that very specific subgenre. Before I get into the good and ill of this movie, I will just say this, if the idea of seeing a Christmas Zombie Musical sounds at all interesting, go see the movie. It might not be playing near you right now, but I get the feeling it’s making the rounds through select markets, so it could show up at any moment. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dig a little deeper into Anna and the Apocalypse!
As you’ve probably already figured out, this movie centers on Anna, a high school senior, and follows her journey through the most festive zombie apocalypse I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t start with the apocalypse though. First, we meet Anna’s friends and father and learn all about her arguments with her father, how her mother tragically passed an indeterminate length of time ago, and how she relates to her friends and jackass ex-BF. Sometimes these things are established through song! Regular high school problems abound, familial disagreements pop up…oh, and then zombies show up. While trying to survive this sudden zombie outbreak, Anna and her friends rush away to find their friends and family and get to safety before they’re all overwhelmed by the zombie hordes. Many musical numbers happen during this struggle.
Okay so, I have to talk about what is probably the most unique aspect of this movie first, the musical numbers. They’re all quite good! I’m not a huge fan of musicals, I generally don’t go out of my way to see them, but they can be good fun, and Anna and the Apocalypse is a perfect example of musical segments that work to propel plot and character development. I can’t really get into the musical numbers in depth because I’m not a huge music guy and I probably wouldn’t be able to explain them that well, but all the songs were catchy and well sung, for the most part, and the choreography and visuals during these sequences were equally impressive. And there aren’t just a few songs in here as a gimmick, there are many musical numbers here that are performed throughout the movie, though they do get scarcer as the movie gets more serious, which isn’t unexpected but I would have liked one or two more songs than we got.
So that plot summary is very short, and that is because this is far more of a character driven story than a narratively complex one, which I have no problem with, as I love character driven movies. The most important of these characters being the lead, Anna, who is a well-rounded high schooler trying to figure out her direction in life by taking a year off and travelling to Australia after high school instead of going directly to college, much to the chagrin of her father. Anna is a great protagonist, she feels modern and authentic, with a good part of that coming from the excellent performance by Ella Hunt, who brings intense humanity to a confusing and difficult time of her life. Anna’s friends are also pretty well-rounded, making up a range of high school archetypes, from her art school-bound best friend John, who is secretly in love with Anna, to her friends Chris and Lisa, the high school couple who are into film and theatre, and waaaaaaay too into public displays of affection, to Steph, a young woman who enjoys volunteer work and being angry about her parents ditching her to move to Mexico and even to Nick, Anna’s jerk ex-boyfriend who the gang runs into after the apocalypse starts.
This group is a great cast to start out this movie and I really like this well balanced gaggle of characters, but I had a lot of problems with where the characters went. I’ll try to avoid spoilers as much as possible here, and I do like them, but I don’t think that these characters ever really developed in any interesting ways. This wouldn’t be such a problem for me if this was a more narrative focused movie, but the plot is so simple and we spend so much time with this main cast that it felt odd that the characters didn’t seem to change much from the beginning of the film to the end of the film. Most of the development that we do see tends to happen off camera, with it focusing on people not in the main group or focusing on moments that we don’t see happen, which did not work for me at all. For example, late in the movie, a character who had been pretty one dimensional revealed a traumatic experience that he recently had, and that would have been okay if we had been familiar with anyone involved or if we got a flashback showing us or if this signalled a sudden significant change in his behavior, but none of those things happened. It just felt kind of hollow and that’s not a feeling I want to have in a movie like this that is so dependent on strong characterization.
In contrast to that, the zombie bits of the movie were a ton of fun! There were a lot of amusing and inventive kills with some awesome gore effects that really helped show why the zombie sub-genre got so big, and that is because you can be so creative with kills and the way zombies look and act and move and sound and pretty much whenever there were zombies on screen I was happy. There are some minor nitpicks I have about the zombies, problems which tend to crop up across most zombie fiction, which are things like how the zombies seem to be more dangerous when the plot needs them to be more dangerous and less dangerous when the plot needs them to be less without having a justification for this shift. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, particularly when we’re shown that zombies have taken over huge parts of town moments before we see a couple teenagers with improvised weapons not have too much trouble dispatching a decent sized group of them. Let me reiterate, this is a nitpick, but it’s something that I couldn’t not notice, so I thought I should include it.
There are things I can nitpick here but that didn’t do much to stop how much I enjoyed this movie and its gory fun musical numbers. Characters were a little underwritten sometimes, but the cast picked up the slack and helped make a group of people who felt like an authentic group of high school students trying to figure out what to do now that the world is broken. Though I wasn’t super thrilled by the ending, I enjoyed the journey and there’s something to be said about a movie that succeeds while balancing the busy subgenres of Christmas movies, zombie movies and musicals, which Anna and the Apocalypse definitely does. If this is playing near you, please see it. There’s a lot of fun to be had and I’m all for supporting new weird movies, and I suspect this one is well on its way to becoming a cult classic!
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