Just finished watching Inmate Zero.
Also coming back to this after looking it up and the actual title of this movie is Patients of a Saint but got listed otherwise I guess? anyways-
I feel like anyone's time would be better spent watching The Girl With All The Gifts. Character driven narrative in a post-apocalypse zombie setting with all that good nihilism that makes a post-apoc film tasty.
irt Inmate Zero -
It felt like a movie that had ideas but dropped them because they had to do action scenes and shots or they muddled everything up and ended up just being really generic.
The first 15 or so minutes are set up so it feels like it might be more supernatural or psychological for a horror film and it sets up some stuff about politics from the outside world and the different dynamics in the prison.
It ends up meaning ultimately nothing, it doesn't change the main protag's arc at all or how people react to her. She was kind of flatly written, there were some bits about her past and how others treated her and how she could have been written or reacted differently but she's just kind of boring. It feels like she's just a focal point for the camera to follow rather than making any really strong decisions.
There was some interesting stuff w/ the zombies regarding lights that I realize now was kind of lifted from Train to Busan and...it didn't make a huge difference.
ALSO holy shit the larger black female prisoner who gets written as a maternal figure and a mother sacrifices herself over/with the special needs extra childlike white woman that everyone else treats like a literal child. Like. It would have been better to have her go out with the other woman who she was actively looking after even before this other woman showed up. Or like, have her make it out. Have her make it out and go looking for her child. That would have felt a lot more emotionally charged for an ending!
This movie makes the living characters pretty one note and sometimes the only note seems to be 'stereotype'. The one character I mentioned earlier (I think she was called The Butcher?), she felt like she had more depth and gravitas than not only the main character but most of the cast. The other characters kind of get put into boxes like 'effeminate gay man who gets called slurs every other dialogue', 'racist white guard' and 'black guard who's just there for the white guard to be racist to'.
It didn't bring anything new or interesting to the genre and it felt fumbled. And like, for a zombie movie that was made in 2020? Zombies got played out in the early 2000s to the mid 2010s (and I am a huge fan of zombie media), you need to be bringing something new to the table and it has to be more than 'but what if zombie movie with women leads!'. There are already some very good zombie movies with women leads! I listed one right at the top, there's also Here Alone which I personally really enjoyed though I see it has some mixed reviews. Hell, if you want action then go for the resident evil series with Milla Jovovich.
It's so mid it's disappointing. It felt like it had potential and it just sizzled.
