What starts out as a quiet Saturday for Sandra (Nerea Barros), her husband Liam (Willam Miller) and their children Emma (Alma Bruno) and Lucía (Claudia Lilley) slowly turns into a nightmare, as the worldwide outbreak of a virulent disease reaches their sleepy, suburban neighbourhood…
We’re in infected/undead territory once again, which is not necessarily a bad thing if you’re into the subgenre as much as I am. I would argue that, although this particular horror space is somewhat overcrowed, there’s always room for a fresh vision and writer/director Manu Pons leans more into the human drama generated by such a potential mass extinction event, rather than unrelenting, blazing zombie action.
The opening doesn’t even focus on the featured family’s dynamics, but heads to an educational establishment where two students discuss their project on the subject of plagues, punctuated by the odd, flippant comment from their peers but mainly giving the viewer a quick Pandemic 101, nodding to the Black Death and suggesting newer, more technological variants on rapidly transmitted epidemics. It’s at that point we’d expect to follow that class – or at least the presenters of the talk – into a situation where their schoolwork becomes terrifying reality, but we’re off to join the breakfast rituals of Sandra and co, where the conversation also turns to plagues and the Black Death gets a further namecheck. Would you like thoughts of agonising death with your pancakes?
As much as the first act sets up the tense situation between Sandra and Liam, with their kids in the middle of two folks possibly looking to go separate ways, the overload of foreshadowing and the leisurely pace at which the story ambles along even before any of these folks decide to leave the house feels a bit of a patience tester, especially for those who may have seen the trailer and are waiting for tense face-offs and desperate escapes from hordes of drooling ghouls.
It’s a good half hour before Sandra and Liam head to the supermarket and start to get the inkling that something is very, very wrong and although there’s a fabulous, throwaway line from the increasingly irritated Sandra – “The end of the f***ing world, just what I needed right now” – The First Day (2026) still takes further time in unveiling the threat, at which point it switches to an increasingly fraught race against time to find a way of fleeing a hopeless looking situation and keeping the family unit together.
The First Day feels like a very good episode of an hour long, standalone horror series stretched out to ninety-one minutes, so most of the suspenseful moments have the air taken out of them by long stretches where the viewer knows something bad is going to happen, but is kept waiting by the resolutely deliberate pace of the piece. It’s frustrating because when this is good, it’s very good, with smart, unshowy touches, such as the TV not being able to pick up a signal, a distant explosion reflected in a window or a baby’s dummy dripping blood replacing big scale destruction and gore.
Where The First Day does score is in its performances, specifically that of Nerea Barros, who’s set up as the role which would often degenerate into the kick-arse action babe in less considered takes. Her scenes with Miller occasionally stray into the warring couple tropes we’ve seen many times before, but the resolution of their relationship problems provides a gut punch which carries across the final, surprisingly downbeat act, as matters gets darker with each plot turn and that cute kid who was introduced about twenty minutes in? Not so cute anymore.
As something that is clearly attempting to bring something to the (doomy breakfast) table, The First Day shifts focus away from charging, slobbering maniacs and gory eviscerations to examine the strain on family bonds. The languid tempo of the screenplay is akin to the classic, shuffling masses of Romero’s canon rather than the more fleet of foot afflicted seen here and the eventual, brief scrap between the clean and contaminated may come far too late in the day but if you look at Pons’ film as a drama which inevitably slides into horror the lack of splashy effects doesn’t matter and the brutality comes from the emotional toll taken on the protagonists. Of course, you could argue that 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple manages to deliver on both counts but The First Day is still sporadically impactful on a fraction of the budget. However, as mentioned previously, a fairly high level of patience may be required.