In this fantastic post-apocalyptic drama with zombies, director Henry Hobson has taken us to a future where the biggest danger for mankind isn’t the undead but other people, and what they do to victims once they are infected. It goes a lot deeper than a team of people shooting heads off or being ripped apart, rather it goes straight to the human condition and challenges it; it questions if sending loved ones to an infamous quarantine is right or wrong.
Although the premise builds it up as the typical horror survival film, don’t be fooled. Maggie develops more as a drama, taking us behind the closed doors of a family coping with their daughter’s gruelling transformation into a zombie. Expect scenes that make you jump but also tension between the family members. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as the father, Wade, and he must protect his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) from the undead, the police and even herself.
If you were in Wade’s shoes, do you put your daughter in an inhumane quarantine, or do you still take care of her until the very end? Wade has to think this through but it doesn’t help that the police, and his wife, are pressuring him to put Maggie away. Maggie is engaging, a morality tale that makes you question your conscience, whose side you choose, and subtly criticises the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude of other zombie films.
Hobson is ingenious, he makes sure our hero doesn’t have one set way of thinking but he has to see it from the authorities’ point of view. One night Wade encounters his neighbours further along in the transformation process, and he is forced to do something that goes against his convictions. This leads to the pivotal line of the film, a police officer looks at Wade and says, ‘Just think of what you had to do tonight and think what it may mean for your daughter’. It’s harrowing, the subtext is obvious but it’s the fact that it isn’t said.
The piece is worryingly authentic, the characters try to create normalcy as though nothing bad is happening, but Hobson doesn’t alienate us from them, rather he connects us to what they’re feeling through things like outbursts and back-handed comments. As time goes on we start to see the cracks but funnily enough Maggie is the hardest to read. There are a lot of scenes in which she wears sunglasses, as though she is hiding her emotions. Her conversations with her siblings are typically plain and she tries to draw out humour at every available moment. When no one else is around, she finally breaks down and we become aware that Maggie is wearing a mask. This paradox presents her as one of the bravest characters in the film because we realize she bears her suffering for her loved ones.
Maggie deserves credit, it is so unique for a film to focus on a single girl becoming a zombie, and yet Hobson still manages to create a world where a lot is happening around her. Yes, this may have led to some of the scenes having less focus than others, but it gives depth. It presents Maggie as an example, one among many of the unseen stories, but at the same time nothing personal is lost, we still get the richness of her tale played out.
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One could say a disadvantage is that the film misses out when the piece is set and how exactly the world has become rife with zombies, but this does build mystery and helps to foreground Maggie’s character. The choice of setting, a farmland, actually adds to that feeling of isolation; it justifies that there are questions left unanswered.
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