BY DAY’S END: HORROR FILM REVIEW

 
I don’t know about you, but all these terrifying COVID-19 developments in the news is really starting to get to me. So I figured I’d relax by putting on a nice soothing horror movie about… an apocalypse brought on by the spread of a deadly zombie virus.
 
Well, shit.
 
By Day’s End is a found-footage zombie movie directed by Michael Souder (Hunger) and written by Souder and Justin Calen-Chenn (Folklore). The popular opinion is that the market for zombie films is a tad saturated, and the found-footage bubble burst yonks ago. So combining the two? A pretty bold move. But of course it’s always possible to fly in the face of the odds and make a great film. Sadly, this isn’t a great film, but at least it’s not a bad one.
 
This film is about a relationship in crisis. Our camerawoman is Carly (Lyndsey Lantz), a sort-of doctor who’s been evicted along with her girlfriend Rina (Andrea Nelson) and forced to live in her friend’s hotel for a while. Things are looking grim, as they argue and snipe and are cruising for a breakup. But soon the hotel is overrun with zombies and the couple are fighting to save more than just their relationship.
 
The zombie outbreak is the weakest part of the film’s plot. There’s nothing we haven’t seen before, nothing really fresh or new. The zombies retain something of their former lives and get a bit smarter  if they’ve recently eaten, but that’s been done before and more interestingly. It’s stated that there’s a different infection vector than just biting, as the first victim of the film wasn’t bitten at all, but nothing comes of it. The freshest thing is a cute sequence where a zombie mugs for the camera then steals it to seemingly go make her own movie, with the camera passing to hotel-owner Wyatt (Joshua Keller-Katz) for a while after he kills her. It’s nice to see the camera passed around like this, it gives the film a greater sense of movement and action than if we’d stayed confined to the room with Carly.
 
That said, we don’t just see the events unfold through Carly’s camera, we’re also treated to lots of CCTV footage of the hotel premises (it’s one of those open-courtyard motel type places us Britishers only see in movies). These are usually silent, giving a lovely eerie sense that you’re spying on things you shouldn’t be allowed to see. It enhances the voyeur-y feel that found-footage films tend to have, and mixes well with the more intimate gaze we get from Carly’s camera.
 

Of course, it does add a further layer to the usual problems that this film suffers from. The most obvious is Put The Damn Camera Down: characters in found-footage films always keep filming when they should be dropping the camera and running away. The Borderlands got around it by making the cameras head-mounted, and the beginning of One Cut of the Dead justified it by having the megalomanic director insist that everything be filmed, but there’s nothing here to compel Carly to record everything. Picking up videography as a new hobby/job just doesn’t cut it. The second big problem is the editing: who spliced in the CCTV footage, and how did they get their hands on it? And the third problem is the worst of all: who’s filming the shots in the hotel room that aren’t captured by Carly’s camera? It’s not CCTV and it’s not Carly’s camera, so…? It feels like they couldn’t work out how to block the scenes from the camera’s perspective so they cheated and hoped we wouldn’t notice. We noticed.
 
The relationship drama was easily the most interesting and entertaining part of the film. Seeing this couple stumble towards a breakup that’s been a long time coming was really compelling, definitely helped by how good the leads were.  Lantz gives a fantastic performance – in fact, towards the end I began to wonder if her shoulders were sore from carrying the whole film the way she did. Perhaps that’s a tad unfair to the other film-makers, but she was easily the best thing about the film. Her performance was effortlessly real, and it was largely down to her that the tragedy of the third act was so effective. Nelson was good as Rina, but really shone towards the end with a very physical performance. Katz was sadly pretty flat and monotone, which I think was an attempt at macho intensity (Wyatt is ex-army and a conspiracy nut who was prepared for this outbreak). It’s his first role, though, so there’s always room to grow.
 
In all, it’s best to think of this as a lesbian tragedy with zombies rather than as a horror film. It doesn’t scare or instil dread or even gross out, but it does leave you with a deep sadness that lingers long after the credits have rolled. If that’s what they were going for, then mission accomplished!
 
3 ginger nuts out of 5