Grimm Up North 2010: OPSTANDELSEN (aka RESURRECTION) review

With a title like Opstandelsen - Resurrection - you might expect something fresh, innovative or at least uplifting, but this little Danish zombie flick is about as grimly downbeat as they come. Checking off all the classic tropes - a single location, a deeply flawed cast nursing a variety of crippling psychological issues, a group of survivors turning on each other - it clocks in at under an hour, and doesn't suggest there was much left on the cutting room floor. So what makes it memorable nonetheless?

You have to applaud its single-minded purpose, for one. When even other low-budget genre entries spend a great deal of time on scene-setting or side-stories which might have been better dropped from the running time, it's refreshing to sit down with something that charges straight into the apocalypse.

A family gather at a remote rural church to mourn their dead brother, Simon, but as the preacher's sermon grows ever more stentorian the dead come crawling out of their graves, hungry for the taste of living flesh. Simon's three siblings, Peter, Johannes and Ruth, escape into the priest hole below the church, but with nowhere to go they either have to brave the zombie hordes or risk losing their fragile alliance.

There's some basic exposition explaining Peter is the black sheep of the family, with Johannes disgusted at his lack of proper contrition, but it's over and done with very quickly, with a great deal of the remaining running time devoted to running, screaming and covering the three leads in gore.

The violence follows the classic zombie template - not remotely realistic but shockingly excessive. For the most part it's too over-the-top to qualify as disturbing or frightening, with the emotional impact coming from context rather than how explicit the kills are, though director Casper Haugegaard lingers on one sequence so long and so closely it walks a fine line between legitimately horrifying, farcical or just plain exploitative.

Why do we care? Well, the performances are solid enough; hardly nuanced or particularly complex, but relatively plausible. Opstandelsen barrels along fast enough it doesn't really afford the viewer much time to contemplate plot holes. The three siblings are archetypes, but the film clearly has no pretensions to making them much more than that, and while it doesn't flesh them out beyond briefly courting the audience's sympathy it doesn't give them so much detail it becomes distracting either.

Haugegaard and DP Michael Panduro shoot in quick, effective flashes, lingering on each scene about as long as could be expected, given the pace. The action isn't that complicated - most of the setpieces involve running away - and the camerawork is more than competent, but nothing amazing. The aesthetic is worth mentioning, though, with the film presented in an almost monochromatic colour palette where the darkness becomes washed-out shades of blue and the whites are bleached bone-dry. Alongside the rapid spiral downwards into violent death after violent death, this feels like significantly more than a budgetary limitation.

Again, Opstandelsen is certainly bleak. Unlike Franck Richard's recent The Pack, say, where the director only yanks the rug from under the audience right at the climax, Haugegaard establishes a sort of hopeless miserablism from minute one. A tiny church in the middle of nowhere, a firebrand preacher, a dysfunctional family and browbeaten antihero hardly suggest rainbows and kittens to come, even before the zombies make their entrance.

Yet like The Pack's ending, Opstandelsen is clearly about more than kicking the viewer in the teeth. There is a narrative arc, if a slender one, with an appropriate if very brief climax for which the blood-soaked nihilism definitely serves some purpose. While the director is clearly a long way from top tier-material yet he does manage to avoid turning the whole thing into nothing but ghoulish voyeurism.

It's a calling card, basically, but with enough subtext and darkly textured worldview it makes you wonder what Haugegaard will do next. He's obviously fascinated (like all good splatter freaks) by the possibility of how best to take people apart onscreen, piece by bloody piece. Yet at the same time there's more to this than just popcorn entertainment for the Friday night crowd with strong stomachs - a black thread of artistic misanthropy that suggests Haugegaard and his crew might have longer, richer stories to tell. By all means see Opstandelsen for the brains, if you're after some quick and dirty gore and you're not feeling too fussy, but the more discerning horror fan should also know it still comes cautiously recommended.

(Opstandelsen was screened as part of Manchester's Grimm Up North 2010.)