Anna and the Apocalypse | Little White Lies

Anna and the Apocalypse

28 Nov 2018 / Released: 30 Nov 2018

Words by Kelli Weston

Directed by John McPhail

Starring Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming, and Sarah Swire

A young woman with dark hair holding a red and white striped candy cane in the foreground, with a blurred natural background.
A young woman with dark hair holding a red and white striped candy cane in the foreground, with a blurred natural background.
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Anticipation.

Not crazy about zombies, but fond of Christmas-themed tales and can be swayed by a musical.

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Enjoyment.

The occasional good joke and rare emotional landing don’t make up for the wobbly tone.

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In Retrospect.

There are better zombie films and better musicals, and perhaps they work best apart for a reason.

The zom­bie apoc­a­lypse hor­ror gets a fun fes­tive makeover cour­tesy of writer/​director John McPhail.

Nail­ing the tone for a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse high school Christ­mas musi­cal was always set to be a tricky task. Anna and the Apoc­a­lypse, from Scot­tish direc­tor John McPhail, man­ages about as well as you would expect, which is to say awk­ward­ly. In some ways that awk­ward­ness – the dia­logue, the per­for­mances, the songs – feels appro­pri­ate; these are teenagers, after all, stum­bling toward the per­son they want to be or whomev­er they will ulti­mate­ly become.

And there is an argu­ment to be made for the bleak, if res­o­nant, alle­go­ry under­pin­ning McPhail’s tale: What kind of world will these teenagers – their whole lives sup­pos­ed­ly ahead of them – inher­it? And when not utter­ly use­less, how com­plic­it are the adults around them in the empti­ness of that future? Unfor­tu­nate­ly, earnest as it may be, the film is a rather pre­dictable rehash of all the gen­res it’s juggling.

The film opens as Christ­mas approach­es sleepy old Lit­tle Haven, the dead-end town from whence our young hero­ine Anna (Ella Hunt) plots her escape (a gap year in Aus­tralia before uni­ver­si­ty), much to the cha­grin of her wid­ow­er father Tony (Mark Ben­ton). Mean­while, her best friend John (Mal­colm Cun­ning) har­bours a secret crush on her and Nick (Ben Wig­gins), her obnox­ious ex and some­thing of the school bul­ly, per­sists with his own sex­u­al over­tures toward Anna.

The sick­en­ing­ly affec­tion­ate cou­ple Chris (Christo­pher Lev­eaux) and Lisa (Mar­li Siu), with lone­ly Amer­i­can stu­dent Steph (Sarah Swire) – dumped in Lit­tle Haven by her absent, neglect­ful par­ents while they go trav­el­ling – round out the gang of mis­fits. Typ­i­cal high school anx­i­eties plague them, and before zom­bies descend upon their qui­et bor­ough, their biggest adver­sary is spite­ful school admin­is­tra­tor Arthur Sav­age (char­ac­ter actor Paul Kaye admirably giv­ing it his all), who nev­er miss­es an oppor­tu­ni­ty to assert his ten­u­ous authority.

These aren’t so much char­ac­ters as card­board cutouts. Hunt turns in a win­some per­for­mance, but the admit­ted­ly like­able Anna appears to have no dis­cernible flaws or inse­cu­ri­ties. Sim­i­lar­ly, the oth­er kids each have their thing’ in place of an arc: Chris is a film nerd, Lisa vibrates the­atre kid’, while Steph is the polit­i­cal­ly con­scious stu­dent jour­nal­ist, and a les­bian with a con­ve­nient­ly long dis­tance girl­friend. Notably, Steph nev­er gets the chance to active­ly express her sex­u­al­i­ty or desire like the rest of her classmates.

This choice casts back on a fun­da­men­tal­ly con­ven­tion­al film. The pop songs, at times cloy­ing­ly on the nose, are per­fect­ly decent if for­get­table; so, too, the jokes, with rather obvi­ous pop cul­ture ref­er­ences to Rihan­na and Tay­lor Swift. In part, the zom­bie rules are so ingrained in cin­e­ma they scarce­ly need explain­ing. The audi­ence knows full well the zom­bie bite spells doom for its vic­tim. Occa­sion­al­ly the crea­tures here become the cat­a­lyst for some rather potent emo­tion­al moments between the human char­ac­ters, but most­ly they func­tion as an excuse for relent­less­ly graph­ic and bloody fight sequences.

With­out a doubt, Anna and the Apoc­a­lypse could use more pol­ish, but it’s also a labour of fun, if not love. All of the actors – Kaye in par­tic­u­lar – seem to be enjoy­ing them­selves, mak­ing it an immense­ly engag­ing if not always reward­ing watch.

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