dirs. RKSS Collective

In the opening scene of We Are Zombies, a corpse slouches across the pavement, his left foot dragging behind him. He groans. His arms are outstretched towards an unsuspecting man, who’s finishing up at the pickup window of a local burger joint. 

The zombie gets closer. The customer finishes paying, thanks the waitress, grabs his milkshake. Slowly, he turns around, and then two men—dead and alive—collide. There’s a scuffle. This is a post-apocalyptic tale as old as time. Anyone who’s ever heard the word zombie knows what’s going to happen next. 

Or maybe not. Because instead of going for brains, this zombie extends an open palm and asks “spare change?” He looks up at the living man with desperate white sockets. This zombie is pitiful, not powerful, more human than monster. 

We Are Zombies is both a love letter to the undead cinema canon and a fresh twist on a musty genre that’s been around for over ninety years. The film was written and directed by François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, the minds behind the French-Canadian filmmaking team RKSS (short for Roadkill Superstars). The trio rose to prominence with their post-apocalyptic film Turbo Kid, which premiered at Sundance in 2015. Their sophomore feature, Summer of 84, established their filmic language—the team loves to play with conventions in genre, upholding their tenets while subverting expectations and updating themes for a modern audience.

Like its predecessors, in We Are Zombies the dead have come back to life and no one knows why. But are they bloodthirsty? Not really. In this world, the undead coexist among the living. There are zombie CEOS, undead porn stars. Men get shot then resume their menial jobs as body collectors. Even Mother Teresa is a from-the-grave fashion icon, attending red carpet events in style.

The bulk of the film follows three unlikely heroes, Karl, Maggie, and Freddie acted by Alexandre Nachi, Megan Peta Hill, and Derek Johns. The trio’s dynamic—brother, sister, and best friend—directly maps to that of the film’s three directors—who are also brother, sister, and best friend — though the similarities, I assume, stop there.

When they’re not playing Dungeons & Dragons or masturbating, Freddy and Karl are the boots behind a scam operation that steals zombies—or the “living impaired” as they’re called now—from a mega corporation so they can sell them to a body-mod art collective. When the company gets wind of their scheme, Karl and Maggie’s grandmother is taken hostage by corporate baddies, and our protagonists are sent on a madcap quest to get her back.

The movie is inspired by a similarly named comic book series The Zombies That Ate The World. In homage to its original medium, the movie retains the rollicking plot and teenage boy humor of a classic graphic novel. One of the primary side characters is a ZILF cosplayer (yes that’s a thing). Another dies in a sex chair. Expect some groans and also some guffaws, but in any case, the movie is impeccably adapted. No penis laser pointer is left unused, no shoelace left untied. Every prop and joke is called back at a later time to achieve greater comic effect. 

When I started watching We Are Zombies, I was concerned that the movie wouldn’t have narrative stakes. It’s a reasonable question: how can you have consequences for characters in a world where it doesn’t matter if one is dead or alive? But I shouldn’t have worried. The drama of the film is most alive in the dynamic between and the development of the three main characters, irrespective of their alive-status. There’s Freddy’s irrepressible crush on Maggie. Karl’s first real-life sexual encounter with a zombie he’s followed online for years. Maggie’s softening to her brother’s shenanigans, her journey to prioritizing love over money. And of course there’s granny, whose storyline brings a wholesome levity to the film.

Even though these zombies are innocuous at the jump, there is bloodshed to be had in the third act of the film. However, this isn’t because the undead are inherently evil, as is the norm of the genre, but rather an outcome of prejudice and corporate greed. Like all the best zombie narratives, the undead are a foil in We Are Zombies for social critique. The movie achieves a level of self-awareness closer to Shawn of the Dead than Night of the Living Dead, but this is a horror-comedy after all, so that’s to be expected. 

Without giving any spoilers, the very end of the movie leaves open the possibility for a sequel. After I watched the closing credits, I spent the next thirty minutes combing the internet to see if I could find any information on whether there was one in the works. No luck, sadly. But what did become clear as I read my umpteenth IMDB page was that after 80 minutes, I still wanted more. Fair play, RKSS. 

dir. Mitzi Peirone

Filmmaker Mitzi Peirone’s sophomore film Saint Clare (stylized as SAINT CLARE) follows sociopathic Catholic schoolgirl Clare Bleecker as she seeks to violently uncover the perpetrators behind a string of abductions targeting teenage girls in her anonymous small town. Bella Thorne stars as the eponymous Clare alongside Ryan Phillippe portraying Detective Timmons, a policeman tasked with tailing Clare, whom he correctly believes is responsible for the murder of a local deadbeat Joe (Bart Johnson). Rebecca De Mornay plays Clare’s eccentric grandmother and caretaker who steps up in the wake of the death of the girl’s parents, and Erica Dasher plays Amity, Clare’s frenemy and co-star in the college play. 

The film opens with a rejoinder spoken continuously by Clare throughout the film, “Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God,” attributed to Joan of Arc. Clare quietly but persistently intones this prayer during the film’s opening sequence, in which we learn, via flashback, that as a child she once killed a man assaulting a woman in the wilderness by bludgeoning him from behind with a rock. She also repeats this phrase to Joe, who offers her a ride home from her campus in his filthy car—presumably with intentions to rape her and mark her as the next girl to be disappeared—before she strangles him with his seatbelt and sends the vehicle hurdling off the road and into a building. 

This murder sets off a chain reaction of events that causes Clare’s grandmother to grow concerned with her increasingly dissociative mental state, Detective Timmons to begin to close in on her as a suspect in the murder, and eventually, Clare herself to discover a nefarious sex trafficking ring operating on the outskirts of town. This unremarkably harrowing organization is helmed by Randall (Joe’s identical twin also portrayed by Johnson, only this time in a bad wig), protected by a corrupt Detective Timmons, and given insider access to teenage girls via Amity, who has double-crossed her friends. As Clare gets closer to the banal center of these crimes, her conscience—personified in the form of Bob (Frank Whaley), a drunk mailman whose death she previously witnessed, plagues her with guilt—attempts to reel in her unwieldy behavior. In the film’s rushed ending, Clare, faced with Amity’s betrayal, substitutes a prop knife for a real one just before they take the stage for the play’s opening night, in which the duo will soon spar.

Saint Clare is a mostly forgettable entry in the soon-to-be-oversaturated genre of feminist revenge thriller films that reached its climax with Promising Young Woman (2020, directed by Emerald Fennell). This genre traces its roots to the sexploitation rape-revenge films of the 1970s, infusing it with an identity-driven sensibility and feminine flair that appeals to a new generation of true crime-pilled female media consumers. Saint Clare‘s problem is not so much one of themes as it is one of execution. Thorne’s laconic performance does not do much to invigorate a film lacking a strong thematic throughline, clear exposition, or genuine thrill. The cinematic goldmine of Catholicism, at the very least, furnishes Peirone with a reliable set of decadent visuals and a moral compass a la Immaculate (2024, directed by Michal Mohan) to guide the film through a poorly written plot in the hands of a cruel God suited to feminist horror. But Peirone does not take this opportunity far enough, opting to only invoke religion as necessary, with the occasional voiceover quoting Joan of Arc during flashback sequences, perfunctory shots of the college-age cast singing ominous hymnals in the school choir, and a pretty sequence in which Clare pays her respects to her dead mother in a baroque mausoleum.

Peirone’s strength lies in her strong eye for austere visuals that break up the forward motion of the film with much-needed shots of voluptuous gore: blood slowly seeping into the shower drain, a brief, staccato sequence as the film winds down where Clare remembers her dearly departed grandmother (who has been killed by Detective Timmons, of course) through fragmented flashbacks interspersed with key encounters with violence at a young age. If only the director had committed wholeheartedly to this sensual approach without relying on the trappings of a mediocre horror formula that sees our final girl avenged and our villains vanquished, Saint Clare might have broken new ground. What could have been an exciting exploration of the psycho-religious interiority of a female anti-hero instead succumbed to the homogenizing dictates of the box office.

“So trenchant is the critique of masculine attitudes and behaviors [in male-directed rape revenge films] . . .that were they made by women, they would be derided as male-bashing. (Were they mainly consumed by women, they would by the same token be derided as a sop to feminism).” Clover’s prescient words penned in Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992) ring true in light of a new era of female-driven, female-directed, and female-consumed revenge thrillers that nonetheless fail to satisfy our innermost desires for retribution against the patriarchy. Perhaps glossy depictions of violence against women will never enact revolution, as hard as we might try to dismantle the oppressor’s house with his blood-splattered toolkit. Saint Clare could be considered a step in the right direction, where the sanitized girlboss feminism of Promising is traded in for a hetero-pessimism more in vogue in this contrarian era of tradwives and coquette Catholics. But until the stymying forces of trope, sexploitation, and millennials ham-handedly writing zoomers are abandoned once and for all, Peirone’s middling attempt at cinematic transcendence will not be canonized by herstory.