One of these two wishes to eat the other. Can you guess who is predator and who is prey?
Warm Bodies (2013) is our annual Christmas movie for 2022. When it comes to Christmas movies, we like to find something that is surprisingly good, with the bar set by Anna and the Apocalypse (2018) in December of 2019, along with Rare Exports (2010) the year before.
So how did Warm Bodies work out? An intelligent take on the possibility that the nearly supernatural pathogen infecting humanity and turning them into zombies might be defeated by our immune systems, given a bit of time, this story follows ‘R’, a young man, or zombie, who retains at least some self-awareness, as he introduces us to the zombie and boney communities. The former are the infected who retain most of their flesh; the boneys are those zombies who’ve torn all the flesh from their own bodies, but still require the flesh of the living for sustenance. They are little more than cranky animated human skeletons.
And ‘R’ doesn’t really feel a part of either community. After all, eating the flesh of the living isn’t an attractive attribute when one runs into a beautiful, uninfected woman named Julie. So he does the next best thing:
He doesn’t eat her.
In fact, he saves her. From here, the story trundles on semi-predictably, from Julie’s repulsion at ‘R’, to acceptance, affection, and of course, well, who knows? All while cleverly dodging the eternally hungry.
But a predictable story, clever and well-done, is nothing to sneeze at, and this is moderately well-done. There may not be the surprises that befall the audience member in Anna and the Apocalypse, from plot to songs, but this subject is treated seriously.
And it works, if you’re willing to ignore a few plot holes. Like, how did the uninfected build a wall around a city so damn fast? How does boneys feeding on the uninfected sustain them, precisely?
But there’s good chemistry and more than a bit of fun here. While it’s not the new bar to clear in the Christmas Movie category, it’s a worthy story.
