Warm Bodies (2013) Review
6/10
A corpse shuffles around an airport terminal, unable to remember his name, aware that he’s 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 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. That’s playing a character whose interior monologue is articulate and whose exterior is capable of about three syllables.
I like about half of this movie a lot, and the other half makes me wonder whether anybody in charge was paying attention to the first. For forty minutes it’s clever, sweet and funny about being dead. Then it turns into a generic CGI chase picture, and I watch a smart premise get traded for a monster finale it never needed.
The Narration Is the Whole Idea
R can think clearly and can’t 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’s also the structure. The audience knows he’s 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’s 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, doesn’t enjoy it, and explains that the brains give him memories. That’s how he acquires the feelings that drive the plot. The film doesn’t pretend he’s innocent.
An interior voice that can’t reach the exterior is among 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. That buys it permission for everything afterward. Make the supernatural mechanism do character work. The brains deliver memories. That’s 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’s R, she’s Julie, there’s a balcony scene, her father runs the fortified city, and a friend called Perry dies early. The film isn’t concealing any of this and the question is whether that’s charming or lazy. On the first watch it plays as a wink. On a second it’s more noticeable how much structural work the reference is doing in place of actual plotting, especially in the back half. The balcony scene is doing nothing the film has earned. It’s there because the reference requires it. What the adaptation does add is a reason for the feud that’s not arbitrary. Her father has spent years killing things that look like R, has good reason, and isn’t wrong about any of it until the last twenty minutes.
John Malkovich plays him with no eccentricity whatsoever. That’s a strange and effective use of that actor. He’s 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 the film states once without ceremony, and every position he takes afterward is a man defending the decision he had to make that day. That’s different from being wrong, and the film respects the distinction for most of its ninety-eight minutes. Then the last reel stops caring about it, and I think the film cheats Malkovich out of the ending his performance earned.
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’s 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’s done without dialogue. That airport scene is the main reason this gets a 6 from me instead of something lower. I find it moving, which I never expected from a zombie romance, and it proves the filmmakers knew exactly what their movie was about, at least for a while.
The record player is the other good piece of it. R collects vinyl, plays it in an abandoned aircraft he’s furnished, and the film uses the choice of record to tell the audience what he’s feeling in scenes where he can’t 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 doesn’t 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. That 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’s not the humans, and the film establishes them in a single exposition line as corpses who have stopped being able to want anything. That’s 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.
The Bonies lose me. They look cheap, they move like leftovers from a video game, and every minute they spend on screen is a minute stolen from the story I was enjoying.
They also break the film’s own logic. The whole argument is that the dead can recover, and the Bonies are introduced as dead who cannot. That’s the story creating a category it needs to exclude.
There’s 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 Ends Up
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’s 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.
The last twenty minutes are a fortified city under attack, a father learning a lesson and a wall coming down, and the film arrives at all of it because it has to end somewhere. I spend the whole siege waiting for the movie I liked to come back, and it never does. Teresa Palmer does the other half of that and the film doesn’t 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’s given that works is a reason to be curious instead of terrified. She’s spent her life inside a wall being told a category of thing is simply a category, and the first evidence otherwise is interesting to her before it’s 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’s 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’s worth noticing which of the two the audience is really responding to.
Should you watch Warm Bodies?
Watch it 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 sly, precise Hoult add up to something good enough that the last act stings. Throwing all of it away for skeletal monsters and a wall coming down is a colossal waste, and that’s how a film I like this much lands at a 6.
