Funny how it’s turned out, but zombie horror has been with us so long and appeared so often now, that it all feels oddly comforting. For the most part, tropes which are maddening from other genres seem more than acceptable when there are zombies in tow: it doesn’t even really seem to matter that much anymore whether they are fast, slow or anywhere in-between. Are characters switching off TVs and radios mid-way through what is clearly an important bulletin about what is unfolding? No matter! Are the same characters going through troubled relationships with their offspring, which will no doubt be solved by the issue of surviving a heaving mass of mindless killers? Cool! Is someone, at some point, going to conceal a bite wound? Oh, we can’t stay mad at you. This brings us to Virus: 32, a film which makes some attempt to challenge a trope or two but embraces far more of them, and does a reasonable job in doing so. It’s a solid, workaday film with a bundle of neat elements and minor frustrations, tantalising a key twist which – in the grand scheme of things – doesn’t change things all that much. And it doesn’t really matter, either.
Things start in a fairly unassuming way – elderly resident does something shocking and violent – before we pan out/across to a different apartment and meet our key character, a young woman called Iris (Paula Silva) who seems to have not a care in the world, until her estranged husband turns up with their young daughter. It seems Iris had forgotten she was due to look after her, so she’d arranged to do a night shift at the dilapidated fitness club where she’s on night watch duties (and honestly, this looks like the kind of place no one would really need to break into under ordinary circumstances, but a wage is a wage). There’s nothing for it; Tata will have to accompany her mother to work, so off they go. A nicely-composed aerial shot shows us the comforting fact that something sinister is going on around them unnoticed: it’s the tale as old as time, or not far off. Still, it’s not long before Iris has to take notice of the facts: dangerous, oddly mindless people are finding their way into the building. This fact splits up mother and daughter, who have to spend a period of time seen to one another only on the building’s CCTV or heard via the old landline phones, as small children don’t seem to have iPhones in Montevideo. But, as she witnesses a gruesome attack (animal lovers beware), Iris notices that, post attack, the perpetrators go into a brief kind of trance: about thirty-two seconds of trance, to be exact.
Why does this happen? Funnily enough, seeing as it’s almost-certainly one of the film’s big ideas and its new, small but notable contribution to the genre – enough to be foregrounded in all the press material – there’s no indication. Virus: 32 is pretty low on the whats and the whys, to be honest, and just presents things as they unfold, leaving the audience to ponder anything more. Still, zombie lore is embedded and used in a series of fairly engaging ways, with some clear nods to classic zombie cinema which still look good in their own right. There truly are some great set-ups here, with great uses of light, framing and timing: the zombies themselves, again, are not explained away but they seem part-way between the newly-sentient zombies of Land of the Dead (2005) and, even more so, the high-speed angry bastards of 28 Days Later (2002). This gives you some indication of what kinds of action you are going to see. The film works as a microcosm – this isn’t a horror on the scale of something like Land of the Dead, of course – but its action sequences are decent enough.
There are some issues with pacing, but these don’t really creep in until the middle act: at first, Virus: 32 is a quite light touch, deftly-moving film which manages to create characters out of very little, including a very small cast. It’s some time before the camera even alights on Iris and stays there, for example, and this isn’t a script-heavy film at any point, but enough lands to make the main characters sympathetic and likeable. There are also some neat tricks used in shooting and editing which maintain interest, too, with some innovative shots and long sequences which must have took some skill to put together. The film is a little dingy – it’s pretty much all shot in a large, dark building at night, after all – but it’s not so dark that it becomes impenetrable, and it sets up some accomplished scenes which work rather well. As stated, things falter at the mid-way point when the plot and the level of action begin to scan less well, but the film holds a few things in reserve, including a welcome slab of cynicism for patient viewers.
All in all, and despite the new-idea promise inherent in the title, you can’t really call Virus: 32 a ground-breaking film. As such, it shares many of the issues of other perfectly enjoyable zombie horrors, with some of the same unanswered questions, tolerable frustrations and budgetary constraints. But the budgetary constraints here were pretty punitive, and yet director Gustavo Hernández has managed a decent movie with some good composition, an intriguing, if underplayed idea, a likeable set of leads and a reasonable balance between homage and development. It’ll take up its place in the genre and work perfectly for many genre fans, I’m sure.
Zombie: 32 (2022) premiers on Shudder on April 21st, 2022.