By Keri O’Shea
There seems to be a minor trend in modern horror (and posssibly other genres, though I see less of those) for starting the narrative of a film at around three quarters of the way through the arc you’ll eventually get to see in full. I noticed the same thing about the very last thing I reviewed – Don’t Breathe – in which the very first scene shows us one of the key characters in a heck of a lot of trouble at the hands of another. Structuring the film like this takes a lot of the surprise elements away from the audience; we’re positioned as knowing bystanders, already clued in that things are going to go badly wrong, and left only to observe the finer details. This is evidence, perhaps, of the way in which horror fans have become rather jaded, no longer expected to be carried along by a straightforward linear plot because we’ll have seen it a million times before – but even if I’m extrapolating way too much here, I think it’s fair to say that showing most of your hand of cards before the game has really started is a risky strategy, and one which demands careful work.
This brings me to What We Become (2015), a film which is oddly enough not the first Danish zombie film I’ve ever seen, giving the lie to the trivia section of its IMDb page, but oddly enough, it labours under a lot of the same issues that I talked about five years ago when I reviewed its predecessor, Opstandelsen (‘Resurrection’). I don’t feel customarily coy about calling this a zombie film or worrying too hard about spoilers, either, as even aside from the three-quarters-along start point, our key family’s little girl is plastered all over the publicity materials – looking decidedly bloodthirsty and infectious. So, with the possibility of big surprises receding by the second, the film’s opening scenes (distraught mother, nursing suspiciously ill little girl on her lap, as all people seem to do in films when someone gets infected in this way) quickly give way to a step back in time, and we meet the family in happier days: there’s the slightly wet dad, Dino (Troels Lyby), the domestic martyr, mother Pernille (Mille Dinesen), the floppy-haired teenage son Gustav (Benjamin Engell) and the little angel from the poster, Maj (Ella Solgaard). All seems reasonably normal: Gustav is rebelling in a very low-key way, though gets cheered up by the arrival of a cute new neighbour; his dad is trying and failing to reach out to him, Pernille is doing ALL the work around the house, tuh, and Maj spends most of her time petting her pet rabbit, which (spoiler alert) doesn’t go full Holy Grail at any point.
The film does a reasonable job of setting up the characters here – our main family, plus their neighbours – and this is something it maintains quite well throughout. We get some sense of simmering low-level tensions, but all in all the family unit is represented as settled and normal, with enough time taken to establish their general believability. It soon all goes wrong, though, as we have always known it would: a strange strain of flu arrives in the area, initiating a crackdown which sees people confined to their homes by gun-toting HAZMAT special agents who shrink-wrap the houses (!) and threaten to kill anyone who tries to escape, or indeed asks questions. The family are reduced to watching the TV to find out what is going on, but they clearly aren’t being told everything, and the strain of living on the food and water rations doled out to them by the HAZMAT guys is soon unbearable.
Because that’s what this film is, for the most part – an exercise in claustrophobia, with a family stuck cheek-by-jowl with one another for the forseeable future. And for all the pomp of the opening scene, the pace of the film trickles away beneath the weight of all this …waiting. I’ve already said that What We Become is a zombie film, and yeah, it is, but even this aspect is held off for a long time, keeping the pay-off we all know is coming to the minimum. If this film is about anything, it’s about how people can be manipulated and isolated by societal powers whose authority we tend to trust. (I do not see this film, as other reviewers have done, as a commentary on the migrant crisis, by the way. Perhaps I’m wrong, but then not everything’s symbolic.) Eventually, of course, we get back to the opener, and then we proceed onwards until the film’s close; there are the usual developments, the usual silly decisions and the usual shambling dead laying siege to the living, with no deviations from a plot-line which most of us have seen a hundred times.
I suppose this is my biggest bugbear with this film. It sticks rigidly to a formula, and yes, whilst elements are neatly in place, with decent performances, some good camera work and a number of effective scenes, one might ask – why make a film which is so achingly familiar? Had no other films of this kind ever been made – no imperiled families, no groups of people holed up in houses, no corrupt, cruel officials, no mystery viruses, no bogus healthcare, no symptoms which kill then resurrect, no peckish corpses – then What We Become would be an excellent example of a horror film. As it stands, it simply blends in. Either writer/director Bo Mikkelsen has seen every zombie film and wanted to make an homage of his own for his first feature, or else he’s seen very few and isn’t aware of the raft of similarities here, or just maybe it’s easy to get funding together for a good old zombie movie, but in any case – the sheer lack of distinguishing features here damages the overall competence of this film, which is a shame.