Warm Bodies (2013) Review
6/10
A corpse shuffles around an airport terminal, unable to remember his name, aware that he is not thinking clearly, and narrating all of it in a dry interior voice that nobody else can hear.
The 6 is for a film with an excellent first forty minutes and no idea how to finish. The narration is genuinely funny, the central conceit is worked through properly, and then the plot requires a villain and produces one out of nothing.
Nicholas Hoult is doing something difficult and largely unrecognized, which is playing a character whose interior monologue is articulate and whose exterior is capable of about three syllables.
The Narration Is the Whole Idea
R can think clearly and cannot express any of it. The film’s voice track is a witty, self-aware young man observing his own condition, and every line he speaks aloud is a grunt or a single word delivered with visible effort.
That gap is the joke and it is also the structure. The audience knows he is a person, nobody in the film does, and the entire first act is the comedy of somebody trying to communicate through a broken interface.
The best sequences are the ones where he is trying to be normal. He attempts conversation with another corpse and the exchange consists of two grunts across several minutes, which the narration describes as a good talk.
Rob Corddry plays that corpse and gets the film’s most useful running joke. M is R’s friend by any reasonable definition, neither of them can say so, and the friendship is conducted entirely through grunts, shoulder contact and the occasional shrug.
It also handles the obvious objection directly. R eats people, knows it, does not enjoy it, and explains that the brains give him memories, which is how he acquires the feelings that drive the plot. The film does not pretend he is innocent.
An interior voice that cannot reach the exterior is one of the most efficient comic and tragic devices available, and it costs nothing to build. Every scene automatically contains two layers, and the reader is always in possession of information no other character has.
Address the moral objection early and directly. He eats people and the film says so in the first ten minutes, which buys it permission for everything afterward.
Make the supernatural mechanism do character work. The brains deliver memories, which is how the monster acquires an interior life, and the device is the plot instead of an explanation attached to it.
The Romeo and Juliet Problem
He is R, she is Julie, there is a balcony scene, her father runs the fortified city, and a friend called Perry dies early. The film is not concealing any of this and the question is whether that is charming or lazy.
On the first watch it plays as a wink. On a second it is more noticeable how much structural work the reference is doing in place of actual plotting, particularly in the back half. The balcony scene specifically is doing nothing the film has earned. It is there because the reference requires it.
What the adaptation does add is a reason for the feud that is not arbitrary. Her father has spent years killing things that look like R, has good reason, and is not wrong about any of it until the last twenty minutes.
John Malkovich plays him with no eccentricity whatsoever, which is a strange and effective use of that actor. He is a tired man running a defensive operation who has seen what happens when somebody is sentimental about a corpse.
The film also gives him the one piece of evidence that matters. He shot his own wife after she turned, which is stated once without ceremony, and every position he takes afterward is a man defending the decision he had to make on that particular day, which is a different thing from being wrong and the film is careful about that distinction for the greater part of its ninety-eight minutes, and then stops being careful about it about it at any point in the last reel.
The Recovery Is Well Built
The film’s best structural idea is that the cure is contagious and social. R begins changing because of proximity to Julie, other corpses notice, and the change spreads through the group by observation.
That is a considerably better mechanism than a serum or a bite. The condition improves because the dead start remembering what people were like, having been shown one, and the film stages it as a slow spread through a crowd.
The physical detail is well handled. A heartbeat returns first, then color, then breath, and the film puts the heartbeat on the soundtrack so the audience registers the change before any character mentions it.
The airport full of corpses beginning to hold hands, or standing near each other deliberately, is the most affecting thing in the picture and it is done without dialogue.
The record player is the other good piece of it. R collects vinyl, plays it in an abandoned aircraft he has furnished, and the film uses the choice of record to tell the audience what he is feeling in scenes where he cannot say a word about it.
A cure that spreads socially is more interesting than one administered medically, because it turns recovery into something characters do to each other. The technique also solves your ending. A crowd changing is a resolution that does not require a laboratory or a hero.
Stage the change in physical stages the reader can track. Heartbeat, color, breath, in that order, and each one is a marker the audience can measure progress against.
Put the first evidence on a sensory channel instead of in dialogue. The audience hears the heartbeat before anybody says anything, which makes them the first to know.
The Bonies
The film’s antagonists are skeletal creatures that were once zombies, have given up entirely, and are rendered in digital effects that were poor in 2013 and are worse now.
They exist because the plot needs a threat that is not the humans, and the film establishes them in a single exposition line as corpses who have stopped being able to want anything. That is really a decent idea and the execution is entirely functional.
The problem is what they do to the last act. The film has spent an hour on a delicate premise about communication and recovery, and then produces a chase sequence with computer-generated monsters that belongs to a different and worse picture.
They also break the film’s own logic. The whole argument is that the dead can recover, and the Bonies are introduced specifically as dead who cannot, which is the story creating a category it needs to exclude.
There is a version of that idea which works, where the difference is a matter of time instead of kind, and the film gestures at it once and then drops it. A corpse who has simply been dead too long is a tragedy, and a separate species of monster is a convenience.
Where It Lands
The last twenty minutes are a fortified city under attack, a father learning a lesson, and a wall coming down, all of which the film arrives at because it has to end somewhere.
None of it is bad and all of it is ordinary. The premise deserved a conclusion about communication and it gets a siege with a happy ending and a montage.
What survives is the first half and Hoult’s performance, which is more precise than the film is generally credited with. He plays the recovery in gradations, and there is a stretch in the middle where he is neither properly dead nor properly alive and is visibly frustrated by both.
Teresa Palmer does the other half of that and the film does not always help her. Julie is required to move from terror to trust quickly, and the writing gives her about two scenes to do it in.
What she is given that works is a specific reason to be curious instead of terrified. She has spent her life inside a wall being told a category of thing is simply a category, and the first evidence otherwise is genuinely interesting to her before it is safe.
When your premise is about communication, the ending should be about communication. A siege is available to any story and this one had something specific. The test is whether your climax could be transplanted into another film. If it could, it is not your climax.
Never introduce a category your own rules have to exclude. The Bonies exist because the story needed something unredeemable, and their existence undermines the argument the rest of the film is making.
A performance can carry a premise past the point the script stops supporting it, and it is worth noticing which of the two the audience is really responding to.
Should you watch Warm Bodies?
Yes, for the first half. A zombie with an articulate interior voice and a three-syllable exterior, a recovery that spreads socially through a crowd, and a last act that abandons all of it for skeletal monsters and a wall coming down.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists