Warm Bodies [M]

R is your typical lonely youth: he’s cute, shy, and a little socially awkward… Oh yeah, he’s also dead. A typical day for R consists of wandering aimlessly around the zombie-riddled airport where he lives, bumping into people and occasionally groaning. But one day he sees Julie: a living, breathing, human, and rather than see her as dinner, he falls in love with her. Saving her from a pack attack, R keeps her hidden in his world and soon she begins to warm to him. As each day goes by and R falls deeper and deeper in love, life and feeling begins to creep back into his cold body, slowly changing him from a Corpse back into a human. 

From a tertiary glance, this is not the type of movie that I would go and see. After the explosion of Twilight and that new genre of supernatural romances that are filmed with minimal colours and in a very gritty and dirty and lightless way, a zombie romance is the last thing I would want to see. But I went with a friend and actually ended up really loving this film! 

R is your typical lonely youth: he’s cute, shy, and a little socially awkward… Oh yeah, he’s also dead. A typical day for R consists of wandering aimlessly around the zombie-riddled airport where he lives, bumping into people and occasionally groaning. But one day he sees Julie: a living, breathing, human, and rather than see her as dinner, he falls in love with her. Saving her from a pack attack, R keeps her hidden in his world and soon she begins to warm to him. As each day goes by and R falls deeper and deeper in love, life and feeling begins to creep back into his cold body, slowly changing him from a Corpse back into a human. 

By some infallible and unidentifiable law, there is not a lot you can do with zombies. The whole idea doesn’t exactly leave itself open to a plethora of cinematic opportunities. But Warm Bodies, based on the book by Isaac Marion, is a wonderfully fresh, funny, and genuinely really good movie! 

The story itself is wonderful: this zombie is already different to the rest of the pack and the voice-over narration of Nicholas Hoult beautifully blends with his performance as R. Zombie boy meets living girl and so much of the film’s comedy comes in the form of R’s social awkwardness in wooing and courting Julie. The whole romance is really very touching and your heart just melts when you see R try so hard to make an impression: it’s all very genuine too, the fact that R can’t really speak coherently doesn’t play an essential role in the comedy of that awkwardness at all. 

Running parallel to the romance between R and Julie is the chain of events that their amour sets in motion: the reawakening of life in the Corpse community. As more and more Corpses begin to feel human again, the Bonies (skeletons that are too far gone to change) wage a war against the humans and it falls to the Corpses to choose a side. Through this side-story, we get a great serving of action and gore, which very nicely contrasts against the comedy and drama that comes with the love story. 

Starring Nicholas Hoult, who delivers a great performance, he’s really cute and wholly memorable as R, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, Cory Hardict, and John Malkovich, Warm Bodies is a brilliantly clever story and a wonderfully quirky and greatly enjoyable film. Filled with horror, gore, action, drama, romance, and comedy, I absolutely loved it and will be adding it to the collection when the DVD comes out… for sure!