Deadsight (2018)

 

Ben Nielsen wakes up after eye surgery to find himself handcuffed to a gurney in the back of an ambulance. He has to find all this by touch, mind you, as the surgery has left him temporarily without sight.

Lost and alone and blind would be bad at the best of times, but this is definitely not 'the best of times'.  Quite the opposite, in fact: while Ben was lying there, still sedated from the surgery, the whole world collapsed in an zombie pandemic.

Although he manages to extricate himself from the ambulance, and even fend off the first zombie to find him - all without any real idea what is happening - Ben's chances of survival are pretty remote.  A blind man can't even see a zombie coming, let alone capably fight it off.

So when Ben stumbles across police officer Mara Madigan, it seems his luck has finally changed for the better: after all, Mara can see, and she's armed!

The thing is, Mara is also heavily - heavily - pregnant. Which carries all sorts of physical drawbacks of its own.  Even if they can work together, can two such physically restricted people really hope to survive?

This film's opening gambit probably sounds familiar.  After all, "Someone wakes up in medical care to discover the world has ended while they were asleep" has turned up in a number of books and films, and is a particularly common trope in zombie media, it seems: 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, even the first Resident Evil movie all make use of it.  The scenario predates all of them, of course, dating back to least John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids.  It's a handy narrative device since it allows the point of view character to need lots of explanations, which the audience will then get, as well.

The real question of course, is having started from a tried and tested origin point, does Deadsight justify the time spent watching it?  And I think the answer to that question is "Maybe.  But it definitely has some issues."

Starting with the positives, I appreciate that the film focuses on creating a sense of tension, with only occasional bursts of action to break up the creeping unease.  Of course, the physical limitations of the leads - late pregnancy and visual impairment - definitely helps create a sense of continuous vulnerability, but the film is also smart enough not to squander the tension it creates: there's none of those hackneyed, tension-breaking false alarm scenarios like the old "cat in a cupboard" schtick.

The film also profits from generally solid makeup work on the zombies, though I did notice that this seemed a lot more rudimentary in the final (dimly lit) sections of the film, which is also where we see some rather over the top CGI gore thrown in, as well.

Heck, I am even quite pleased with the cast; the film only has two major roles, and both actors do solid work.

So why is my reaction to the film so lukewarm?  Simply put: it's the script.  It's by no means terrible, and it doesn't have any major clangers, but it does have a number of minor flaws that ultimately combine to undermine the film.

First off, it is inconsistent with how zombies behave.  While they generally seem to be aware of living people only if the human makes noise or is very close, this is not 100% consistent.

Second, it's hard to understand how society has managed to collapse so quickly and entirely.  The film's zombies are slow and not especially strong or resilient: there's no 'you have to go for the head', for instance. Hitting one in the stomach with an axe seems to take it down OK, tasers work on them, etc.  How they would overcome any halfway organised military force is a question best not considered too deeply. On the plus side, I guess it does make it more plausible that our protagonists keep surviving them!

Finally, the very, very ending rang false to me.  This is a shame because the moments leading up to it work well.  It's unfortunate that they are then undermined by what feels like an implausibly glib and convenient last scene.

Ultimately, Deadsight has both good and bad, and while I'm overall enough of a zombie aficionado to have enjoyed it, it may or may not work for you.