Starring Gro Swantkje Kohlhof, Maja Lehrer, Trine Dyrholm

Directed by Caroline Hellsgard

Edinburgh International Film Festival

 

Two years after a virus turned much of the population into mindless ravaging zombies, two young women make the perilous journey between the last two cities, Weimar and Jena…

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die opened the Cannes Film Festival, and it was just one of a series of ‘arty’ zombie or genre movies at that festival, including Atlantics, Zombi Child, Bacura, and I Lost My Body, that suggests science fiction, horror, and fantasy material is being taken more seriously by ‘art’ filmmakers. Ever After (Endzeit) – a 90 minute subtitled German zombie movie with a Swedish director – wasn’t among the Cannes films, but it made for an interesting contrast with Jarmusch’s half-hearted effort in Edinburgh.

More or less a two hander between the naïve, anxiety-ridden Vivi (Gro Swantkje Kohlhof), who escapes confinement in a mental hospital, and the more resourceful and ruthless former photographer Eva (Maja Lehrer), Ever After chronicles their travails as they cross the open country between the sole remaining strongholds of Weimar and Jena. Theirs is a spontaneous journey (Vivi goes on the run in flip-flops), and they are under-prepared for the obstacles they meet – not just the deadly zombies, but lack of water and food, and the need to traverse hostile countryside at night and in all-weathers.

Every zombie film follows its own rules, but Ever After – based on a graphic novel by the film’s screenwriter Olivia Vieweg – sticks closely to the George Romero playbook. The zombies are fast-moving, but they just want to eat brains, and their bite is infectious (as Eva well knows). What makes Ever After more interesting than the offbeat comedy and hopeless meta-fiction nature of The Dead Don’t Die is the fairy tale aspect suggested by the title.

Vivi and Eva encounter a middle-age woman (Trine Dyrholm) surviving on home-grown produce. She’s clearly been infected, but retains her own personality and control of her body. From her face and head, however, there are growths that resemble plant life. The film seems to suggest that humanity has had its time on Earth, and the virus has a purpose in creating a hybrid plant-human-animal combination that might be better suited to stewardship of our endangered world.

That’s a subtext, of course, and Ever After delivers everything you’d expect from a euro-zombie film, with flashbacks to the original outbreak, individual violent attacks, and hoards of deadly undead streaming across a dam in pursuit of the film’s hapless duo. One persistent zombie is a young woman in a full bridal outfit, while enigmatic visions and flashbacks hold clues to Vivi’s own guilt from the day things first went south. It might lack a definite conclusion, but Ever After is a worthwhile addition to an increasingly tired series of cinematic tropes.

Verdict: Written, directed, and performed by women, Ever After is the zombie apocalypse through a fairy tale filter and more optimistic than most entries in the genre. 7/10

Brian J. Robb

 

Ever After screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.