Outside (now on Netflix) poses the question, What’s worse, the zombie apocalypse or mental illness? I’m not sure it has an answer for that, nor is there necessarily one to be had, but this Filipino twist on the traditional undead-takeover formula sure ponders it over the course of 142 minutes. Carlo Ledesma, who contributed a short to Hulu’s scary-season anthology series Bite Size Halloween, writes and directs this psycho-horror hybrid about a dysfunctional family that’s trying to survive zombie attacks and each other – and the results left me scratching my head.
The Gist: We open on an old wedding video, from the Before Times, when happiness was a thing and undead people biting not-yet-dead people and turning them into undead people wasn’t a thing. Then, cut to a battered and filthy car, covered in muddy, bloody handprints, its front bumper askew and flapping. Inside are Francis (Sid Lucero) and Iris (Beauty Gonzalez) and their sons, teenage Josh (Marco Masa) and young Luke (Aiden Tyler Patdu). The tone is somber. Quiet. I mean, you can’t expect them to be playing the License Plate Game, because having fun in this setting just ain’t happening, but the silence hangs in the air, all but suffocating this family.
They reach their destination: A big, isolated farmhouse. Francis grabs a tire iron and takes his sweet sweet time making sure the place is safe. He follows the buzz of flies to a bedroom where an old man with a bite on his arm has apparently taken his own life. Francis pries the pistol from his hand and heads down to the kitchen, where he finds an old woman zombie hissing at him. Her eyes are oil-black, her skin pallid and ruddy with sores. “Mom?” he asks, and then he has to do the deed. Pow. And after that, he digs the grave. The man in the bed goes in too. That was his father.
Meanwhile, Iris seems profoundly unhappy. Is it the death of the world? Goes without saying, I think. Or is something else piled on top of that? It soon becomes clear that the honeymoon is over for her and Francis. It’s vague, but I think she cheated with Francis’ brother, and he was a deadbeat who owed a lot of people money. This is their chance to start over, he insists. Debt doesn’t follow a fella into the post-society world, so who says the apocalypse is good for nothing? But it doesn’t solve the problem of deep-seated marital resentment. That follows people all the way to the afterlife, I bet.
So there’s tension in the air as the fam roams the grounds, cleaning up, tending to some chickens, finding a dead body in a noose in the shed that Francis lets fall on top of Josh, traumatizing him. Father of the year candidate right there. But you know what they say about the sins of the father, and that applies here, because in a dingy basement room next to an old generator is where Francis’ father apparently used to lock him up and beat him. And yet, when Iris suggests they move on in hopes of finding a rumored military base nearby, and to get Francis away from the site of his youthful trauma, he insists they stay. You get it, but you also don’t get it. It’s a fine place for now, but it’s not forever. Francis seems to disagree with that sentiment, though. Strongly.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Outside nods toward iconic zombie films Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later, but it eventually becomes The Shining, But With Zombies.
Performance Worth Watching: Gonzalez finds considerable complexity within Iris, finding earnest truth in a character who’s unwilling to pretend everything’s OK with her marriage, or her husband’s mental state, even for the sake of her children.
Memorable Dialogue: Francis, in reference to how he stood by watching while Josh was traumatized by a corpse: “He saw a dead body. He needs to get used to it.”
Sex and Skin: A brief non-nude kitchen-schtup sequence.
Our Take: Two hours and 22 minutes is a lot of time to spend in the company of a lousy, irreparable marriage occasionally besieged by undead shamblers. Too much time. Let it be known, especially to goremongers, that Outside is more about surviving domestic strife than surviving hordes of zombies. Sure, it spikes here and there with some disgustipating splatter-violence, but this one ain’t about The Kills, bro. It’s about lousy parenting and the psycho-things from childhood that never, ever go away – and to be perfectly frank, the zombie stuff is rendered with more subtlety.
Ledesma leavens the screenplay with some dreary subtext asserting that dodging and decapitating zombies is far from an adequate substitute for couples therapy. Bitterness and jealousy always claw their way to the surface, no matter how deep you try to bury them. The filmmaker indulges long-winded melodrama with the occasional virtuoso action sequence – Francis’ fighting a small battalion of zombies on a narrow bridge plays out in one long, exhilarating take – but the former consists of the majority of narrative weight here. And after a while, after Francis’ screws get a little too loose for comfort, the film goes full hysterical, testing our endurance for overexaggerated portrayals of insanity. I will say Outside is daring enough to explore the withered and ragged ends of its bleak story, which shows admirable ambition. But I can’t say it’s much fun, either.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Outside tries to do something different within typical genre boundaries. But it’s ultimately a long, depressing and generally unpleasant experience.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.