Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson
Director: Henry Hobson
Rating: Two and a half stars
Henry Hobson’s super-bleached debut feature Maggie aims bravely for some sly genre-revisionism, but eventually, artistic intent by itself cannot elongate the available material — worthy of a nice, perhaps consequential short film — into a feature-length drama. The universe of the film is labouring under a full-scale zombie apocalypse; meanwhile, Marguerite (and via-nickname: the eponymous Maggie), a teenager, total sulk, is infected when she is bitten on her arm.
Naturally, doctors take her in, but only as a specimen, since no real cure is known. They recommend she be placed under strict supervision, but Wade, her father, would rather want she return home with him, where he assures them (and himself), “she will be fine”. Inevitably, Maggie’s condition worsens — her deteriorating appearance our only clue to the passage of time — but her father won’t let her be quarantined inside the hospital. Instead, he decides to be on her side till the very end.
The zombie-film genre identifies itself through the pluralisation of its main subject(s): the zombies themselves; they are a major threat because they exist in groups, or hordes, en masse — but never alone. Hobson’s film (and John Scott 3’s script, declared one of the best unmade scripts in Hollywood in 2011) mounts an admirable genre-reversal by choosing instead to consider the sheer solitude of an ordinary young individual devolving into a zombie.
The primary feeling that permeates the conventional zombie-film is that of the fear of an impending zombie-surge, and for those still uninfected, the struggle for survival — but Maggie evades such sensations to instead establish the tragic helplessness of those who surround the afflicted. It concerns itself not merely with the young girl and her anatomical degradation — but also with the loss of those around her (chiefly, her father).
This choice to depict a private circumstance while a major, world-ending apocalypse lingers outside the edges of the frame is worthy of admiration, but unfortunately, does not develop much further than a conceptual proposition (like it does, in say, Shyamalan’s very similar Signs, or Joon-Ho Bong’s incredible The Host). The idea ends up as its own illustration, since it never really is allowed to bloom into an evolving, continuously developing narrative.
There is not much to do for anyone: characters chat up, eat, sit by a bonfire, amble across the fields, indulge in hokey sentimentality and prepare for death. In the lack of any real event (but with a runtime to fill), Hobson devotes his skill instead to genre-based iconography: overcast, dingy skies; damp-wood, lightless interiors; extreme-close-ups of Marguerite’s eyes, cheeks, fingers, toes and whispered, deathly-sounding proclamations. These result in an ironical fetishisation of the very genre he is trying to lament, but at least accounts for the relentless atmosphere of death and grief that rests heavily on the film.
Hobson and his cinematographer Lukas Ettlin shoot the film with a curious music video aesthetic: there are no complete actions, but suggestions of it, the whole film formed by stitching various incomplete snippets together. There is also a deliberate, very engineered artiness to the affair: gunshots (twice or thrice in the film) fire in the off-screen; scenes cut right before the major event, which a character then recounts verbally later — this is all commendable if only for the presence of conscious decision-making, but makes the film seem overly conceived. The characters in the film are shot in hand-held, giant close-ups, which is an excellent strategy for a film that uses disfiguration as a primary theme. Even if that wasn’t the intent, it serves Schwarzenegger — who delivers an extremely sympathetic, super-solemn dad turn — and his perpetually bearded grunt rather well.
The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society
