Outside (2024) - Zombie Horror Film Review

While I have a week off of my day job this week, most of my time will be spent going off to a friends wedding, so I fear that once again my blog will suffer for me having a social life! My best friend visited this past weekend, noticing a new zombie film added to Netflix she suggested we watch it. Outside is a Filipino zombie film written and directed by Carlo Ledesma (The Tunnel). Initially the two hours twenty two minute runtime nearly put us off even watching it, but it really doesn't feel remotely that long, which can only be a good sign.

The film begins properly with a bloody and battered car driving down lonely country roads alongside sugarcane fields. It is driven by Francis (Sid Lucero), and the other passengers include his wife Iris (Beauty Gonzalez), and their two children - young Lucas (Aiden Tyler Patdu) and teenager Josh (Marco Masa). From their dour expressions it is clear that they are not having a good time, but what isn't immediately clear is that their misery isn't entirely caused by the zombie apocalypse they seem to be in the middle of (as suggested by a bloody handprint on the car window). Francis has decided to take them to his parents remote home where he believes they will be safe. This has caused conflict as Iris has heard that the further north you head, the safer it is, and that there are survivor camps situated there, but Francis is adamant his parents house is the safest place to wait out the outbreak.
After arriving and dealing with his dead and undead parents it seems that the family might be alright, but this is the first time that Francis has returned to his family home since he was young, a place where he was badly abused by his father as a child. As well as obvious conflict with Iris, due to a large past mistake she made, he begins to exhibit severe PTSD from being back home. Over the weeks that follow his behaviour begins to get more and more erratic and disturbing to his family, the man determined to keep them together even if that means resorting to boarding up the house and making up lies about how dangerous the outside world has become.

This was a great zombie film and it felt like it did things a little differently to the norm. This is a thriller mixed with a zombie film, Francis, initially likeable, slowly ramps up his craziness, from deciding to hold Christmas in September, to not telling anyone about a map he acquired which is marked with the location of a survivor camp. It is revealed early on that Iris had an affair with Francis' brother and that Josh is a result of that affair. His paranoia that the only reason Iris wants to head north is to try and locate his brother (who had been the one to tell her it is safer there) is exacerbated by being back at his traumatic childhood home. For a film that looks so great on camera there was a surprisingly small cast with just a handful of characters, excluding the undead. The movie takes its time with long segments of zero dialogue as characters walk around, a lot of the story being the family drama. The prologue sequence that takes the form of a fuzzy home video from the unhappy couples wedding day is a strong contrast to the present where they seem to hate each other, the poor children stuck in the middle. The acting was great throughout, the dialogue a mix of Filipino and English, with subtitles that were always clear to read. A shoutout goes to the soundtrack which includes some tracks that felt very Goblin inspired, wouldn't have sounded out of place in Dawn of the Dead.

The undead really felt special here both in the way they look and the way they acted. It reminded me a lot of Pontypool in that the undead speak. In that one the zombies would repeat back phrases they heard survivors say, in this one they have the unnerving habit of constantly repeating the last thing they said before they died. This is exemplified by Francis' mum whose legless corpse crawls towards him while constantly repeating "I'm sorry". This becomes more disturbing when there are hordes of undead, all saying different phrases repeatedly. There are a lot of undead here but they are sparingly used, but their appearance always felt exciting. There was a action packed scene on a bridge, and another one in a sugarcane field, but mostly it is only a few zombies at a time who appear. They have boils on their faces, and open wounds are shown to be writhing with real maggots, which was a really neat idea. They are also both of the running and shambling variety, with them getting slower and slower the longer they are undead. There are some shocking moments of unexpected violence here, leading to some powerful scenes that had me and my friend gasping at times.

I loved Outside, it was definitely a bleak film, but it told a great story, I thought the combination of thriller and zombie film was perfectly executed, while I thought the characters were all believable. Don't let the long run time put you off, or the middling IMDB score, as this was a film well worth watching.

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