Yesterday was massive movie day here at my condo. During the afternoon I have a few friends over, ordered a couple of pizzas, and we watched three classic Universal Horror Films. (The Invisible Man, The Wolf-Man, & The Phantom of the Opera [1943]) Afterwards we spend a few hours playing board and card games, making for a rather enjoyable day just on that, but there was an interesting discovery still waiting for me.

The zombie genre has seen all sort of films mining this public’s fascination with the terminally hungry. We have the zombie movie as horror, (Night fo the Living Dead-1990), social commentary (Night of the Living Dead-1968), comedy (Return of the Living Dead), satirical commentary (Dawn of the Dead-1979), Romantic-Comedy (Shawn of the Dead), and many more but last time I watched for the first time a film that was a family drama set in a zombie apocalypse, Maggie.

Maggie stars Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger . The set-up and the setting are stark and simple. A father (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is trying to care for zombie virus-infected his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) while dealing with the strain of a world collapsing around him and the forces tearing at at his blended family.  Nearly all of the film takes place at the family’s isolated farm, but it is not isolated by hordes of the undead, but rather the collapse of the infrastructure is isolating people as the world slowly descends into zombie fueled chaos.

There are no action set pieces, there are no massive scenes of the undead tearing into people, there are no scenes of high-velocity destruction as fight off faceless hordes. Instead this a story about people caught in emotionally impossible situations and the terrible decisions and unavoidable fates that lie before them. While this story uses zombies and turning into a flesh-devouring automaton as their plot devices the themes apply equally well to anyone watching a loved one suffering under a terminal condition.

This is film also surprises in the range of acting talent is displays for Arnold. This is a quiet movie about emotional hell and he plays it well. Who knew he could cry on cue? Much like Boggart and The Caine Mutiny, this is the sort of story he could not have made under a studio system.

Maggie had a limited releases this year and is currently available on DVD. It’s worth the time.