On paper, Z For Zachariah resembles a much larger operation than it turned out to be. Right off the bat, it’s an adaptation of post-apocalyptic lit, an apparently boundless well into which Hollywood has plunged its bucket quite frequently over the past few years, drawing up heaps of doubloons each time without fail. Though Z For Zachariah doesn’t play to teenage audiences explicitly in the tradition of The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner franchises, it still boasts a trio of heavyweights to fill out its cast: Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor co-stars with America’s newest sweetheart Margot Robbie and Chris Pine, having already demonstrated himself capable of supporting a franchise with the Star Trek reboot. To the casual observer, Z For Zachariah certainly sounds like another late-summer titan pushed by a studio hoping to pick a few more millions out of audiences after the feeding frenzy of June and July.
In practice, however, the film couldn’t be further from that profile. Z For Zachariah isn’t studio-made product rammed down America’s collective throat; the film’s repped by Roadside Attractions, an indie outfit responsible most recently for bringing Mr. Holmes and the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy to domestic cineplexes. Furthermore, Ejiofor and Robbie’s names did not carry the weight that they currently do at the time of their casting. Robbie’s star-making turn in The Wolf of Wall Street had premiered a scant week before she was tapped to replace Amanda Seyfried in the film, and Ejiofor signed on to the project well before 12 Years A Slave began generating Oscar buzz. Z For Zachariah’s a deceptive little film, but only because years of repeated post-apocalyptic spectacle have conflated genre with style. Z For Zachariah breaks away from the pack by taking a more humanistic approach to the end of the world, favoring the small and intimate over the big and loud.
The film effectively removes the apocalypse from the apocalypse, eschewing violent bands of survivors or roving packs of mutated zombies and instead considering the world like a new Eden in which two men jockey to be Adam. The modesty of Zobel’s vision feels novel, even refreshing, because he’s applied a stripped-down aesthetic to a genre that big-budget studio films have forced to be synonymous with high-decibel action and sweeping destruction. Roadside isn’t unaware of this, either. Their trailer plays more like the actor-driven three-hander that Zachariah is, not a high-gloss action spectacle. Audiences have so ingrained the feel of over-the-top bigness in the apocalypse genre that many of the user comments on that trailer pose the question “How is this even sci-fi?” We see, then, that Z For Zachariah serves a vital purpose in the maturation of moviegoing audiences, quietly teaching by example that there’s no premise that can’t be executed with a minimalist bent to great success.
The closest point of reference for Zachariah would have to be the Twilight Zone episode “Two.” Just as that episode played out with two survivors of a nuclear holocaust wordlessly sizing one another up, director Craig Zobel begins his film not with deafening crashes, but silence. Robbie plays Ann, a young girl (a teen in the source material, though Robbie’s well past her teen-playing years) who’s taken refuge from a wave of hostile radiation in a secluded, vernal valley. As she mutely goes about the daily chores required to continue living life in a post-human world, she encounters Ejiofor’s John Loomis, a civil engineer who developed a radiation suit in an underground lab. They form a tenuous partnership after Loomis unknowingly poisons himself with irradiated water, and as they learn to work with one another, romantic feelings blossom between the pair. Complicating this is Pine’s Caleb, a hunky miner who waited out the storm in a mineshaft. When he brings his rugged good looks into Ann and Loomis’ campground, the last remaining human beings on Earth get mired in a love triangle.
Zobel takes a particular interest in the emotional ramifications of apocalypse rather than the massive sociological changes brought about the great reckoning. His last film, the slow-burning Compliance, used the psychological thriller genre as a jumping-off point for a more troubling investigation of humanity’s willingness to do what we’re told over what is right. Once again, Zobel makes a Trojan horse out of genre to pursue far more complex and difficult lines of inquiry, paring the apocalypse film down to its barest elements in order to depict more faults in human behavior. Instead of evading tidal waves of destruction or dictatorial governments, the greatest threat that the trio face is their own pettiness. Both Loomis and Caleb pine for ingenue Ann, but because Loomis was present first, he and Ann commit to one another. When good ol’ country boy Caleb arrives with his face all a-scruffed, Ann can’t ignore that her tastes draw her to him far more than Loomis. Ann’s then faced with the uncommonly uncomfortable predicament of sensitively extricating herself from a dynamic to be with the only remaining man on the planet. A gender-flipped version of this situation played out on FOX earlier this year with The Last Man On Earth, which found Will Forte attempting to ditch the neurotic Kristen Schaal for January Jones. That program found the comedy in the brutal awkwardness of the circumstances, but in playing it straight, Zobel exposes discomfiting truths about the fault lines in decency rather than laughing at them.
He selects a tricky objective for his film, miles removed from the simple will-to-survive narratives dominant in the world of apocalyptic fiction. And that’s only a single component of his commitment to keeping the overall feel of the film low-n-slow. The film’s completely bereft of CGI setpieces or climactic bids for victory over the elements. Zobel relies on dialogue and good old fashioned acting to do most of the heavy lifting for Z For Zachariah, communicating more through his film’s sparse, hushed conversations than through any actual vision of destruction.
Zobel’s film illustrates a crucial truth, and one that’s easy to lose track of when studios pump out nearly indistinguishable tentpoles on a weekly basis: genre’s not inseparable from form. (Or quality, for that matter; Ejiofor overacts at times, and Pine seems to have made a bet with Robbie as to who can pull off a sillier Southern accent.) Under the umbrella of post-apocalyptic fiction — or superhero films, or cop films, or buddy comedies — there’s plenty of room for a variety of approaches. Earlier this year, the indie Doomsdays hid a wounding, wounded character study and Wes Anderson-influenced humor behind the looming threat of the end of days. There are an infinite number of stories about the apocalypse just waiting to be told, and it’d be a crying shame if the movie biz restrained itself to the noisy, spectacular sort. Mercifully, we have films like Z For Zachariah to remind us all of how rich, and accommodating of diverse methods, the premise can be. After all, there’s plenty of room to branch out when everyone else in the world has died of radiation poisoning.
