When the zombie outbreak from Africa reaches India thanks to a ships crew, the apocalypse in spreading. American engineer Nicholas is unwittingly caught in the horror.  He is currently working on a massive project to install wind turbines in rural areas and only has a month left on his contract. He also has left his now pregnant wife Ishani back in Mumbai while waiting for the agreement of her father for them to move back to America. He meets a young slum boy who is also caught up in the outbreak. They team up and fight through the hordes but this outbreak means he has to fight for everything he wants. Fight to find his way back to the sprawl of Mumbai and boths chance of escape, fight for the woman that he loves and wants to take with him and fight to hopefully reach the safety of the west. But with almost 20 million people in their way it might prove harder than they first thought.

Horror often goes through tidal shifts. Like every genre but in classic horror it was driven by politics and message. Take all of Romero’s dead films, which are metaphors for communism, consumerism and creationism/ science split. Horror as a genres brilliance is that it can package a message in a very commercial form and make the audience thrill at the same time. Within the original The Dead was a message of sorts about the ‘other’ and the world at large. It was the Ford brothers that made that film both compelling with slick direction and a standard but solid script. They used some very cost effective but intelligent devices to keep us engaged and after the awful situations they faced while filming (lead actor injured and almost dies, cameras damaged, mobs) they produced a passable effort. This film suffered none of those problems and has seemed to suffer for it greatly. The message has gone and left in its wake is a mediocre script and a very unsettling subtext.

This film is a very well pieced together zombie movie in the sense that it has very good set pieces, excellent gore and even some great composed shots that please the casual film lover. What is disturbing is that the subtext is hard to miss or ignore.  Film can sometimes do things that make me cringe. It can be casually racist, misogynistic, xenophobic or much more. It can also do many of these things without thinking about the content and what message it is sending out. I feel this is what has happened here. Ignore the obvious and sad Slumdog reference. That film had the heartbeat of India (I have lived there and love the place) in the sense that it was changing. This film suggest that nothing is changing and that it seems India is regressing again. Without the white hero the place would fall apart and the job would nt be done.It also sends out a bizarre message about inter racial relationships and modern Indian women. Subservient and regressive but also dominated and scared of their own world being shifted. It is not all bad news however. Meenu is beautiful (I like indian women so you could have guessed I would say that), The film flys along and in the end you could read the film as a metaphor for development and progress. Or even the fear of ISIS and their bullshit philosophy. I actually wish that we could unleash zombies on them and enjoy their erradication. The Ford brothers will make better films…