Mom sitting on the living room sofa in an NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) suit is certainly a conversation starter in the independent short, Zero.
And the conversations continue in this, a serious, heady outbreak short.
The mom says “don’t scream, run or freak out,” to her daughters while her sullen husband looks on and there’s a “certain something” she has to show them.
And what a something it is.
It turns out their younger brother is a hissing, snapping, shell of his former pre-teen self and he’s been strapped to his bed a la Procrustes. He has no pulse, no cognitive thought and lives pretty free-range in that he only eats living meat.
How the family copes with this calamity and the need to put this not-quite-human-anymore thing out of its misery, is what Zero explores over a short, but tense and well-acted 15 minutes.
Is it bad to say we had “zero” expectations? (hey, we get a lot of stuff sent our way).
The film really comes into its own when the mom asks her kids to commit fratricide, or more accurately, to help her commit filicide when “that thing kept biting back at me.”
More a rumination on end-of-life issues than a virus flick, Zero is well-worth a look.
It’s gotta be said that Zero (along with Naked Zombie Girl, the other short we reviewed) looks absolutely terrific and better than many feature-length flicks.
***1/2 (out of 5)
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