Outside

After watching 28 Years Later I have been having a bit of a zombie itch returning, and that's really unlucky given how dead of a genre it is after The Walking Dead ended up sucking up the remaining brains of whatever that genre had left. Since then, it feels like the genre itself has just died off from starvation. Nobody is really making anything for it anymore, and even within the realm of video games it seems that few are deciding to create stories within such worlds. I didn't want to watch something I had already seen, and I knew that watching anything that I hadn't already would likely result in something relatively mediocre. But I stumbled across 2024's Outside which tells the story of a family escaping a zombie outbreak by running off into the countryside and moving to a farm. From the synopsis I wasn't sure what to expect but it held some decent reviews; though I had a feeling that this would be a film that's less about the zombies and more about the survivors and the type of people they are and once were.

Now, I don't mind this. The setup of a zombie outbreak can be metaphorical in ways, but also just serve as a reason for a family to have to pack up and escape their routines and move into a place in which they end up spending more time together. Where they rely on each other more, with survival being something that stresses each person out as they attempt to pull their own weight somehow. And this is where a character's true colours can come out. So, jumping into this film completely blind with no trailers watched and a small synopsis read, this is pretty much what I was assuming I'd be getting myself into. But I do also want to add that this was a fun film to check out coming from the Philippines. I don't think I've really watched much from the region before, with most of my Asian cinema viewings coming from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. This also means the film is in the Tagalog language.

For a Netflix film that sits under the horror genre, I'd have to say I was really impressed with some of the directing in the film. The use of camera movements more as a POV was really immersive, giving us this feeling as if we were often roaming through the environments as the characters we were following, not soon after turning around to reveal that character and se how they themselves are reacting to the surroundings. Their careful steps and worried faces, the use of minimal sound to convey that lack of knowing what awaits them in each room. This is pretty much how the film starts off, and it's a very creative and powerful introduction. I think it's good when a film can use its surroundings and minimal sound to tell its story, not entirely relying on dialogue to do so, and that certainly added to some of the world-building here. Another addition is how the zombies are portrayed: often speaking a language, still holding some aspects of their regular life. A bit more emotional and haunting compared to the usual portrayal of emotionless zombies.

A nice addition to this story is not just the attempts at survival though, but the drama that is held within the family even at the end of the world, where constant threats lurk at every corner, within every shadow. To go anywhere is to risk death, yet the family maintain their personal issues with each other that stem from a lack of trust before everything went south. A mother that appears to have a history of cheating, arousing suspicion in the husband, which can't seem to accept any of it. There's a tension in the air to begin with, heightened by their inability to really connect and trust each other in this world. Particularly in how the father treats one of the boys, which implies he's not the real father to begin with. This drama definitely adds to things, it's nice to see a bit of focus on the human aspect of people attempting to survive a zombie outbreak and not just the usual generic narrative of survivors.

Another thing is that the concept of a scorched Earth in which society completely crumbles, for some it can be considered a second chance. Where the shackles of modern day have been released, and people are finally free from the struggles they once faced: the work obligations, the debt owed from financial pains. For some in the previous world, the collapse is a chance for people to start over. To take some of the free land and grow from there.