Review: Before Dawn (18)

One would assume that the zombie movie genre has been well and truly masticated and disgorged. It has all been done before and will be again.

Before Dawn, a home-grown, low budget, quintessentially Yorkshire shocker that takes the breakdown of a marriage as its core proves that assumption wrong.

The background is of a widening crisis that husband and wife Alex and Meg (Emmerdale regular Dominic Brunt and real-life spouse Joanne Mitchell) only ever glimpse – until she is attacked by a blood-soaked moorland wanderer. Suddenly their weekend hideaway – they’ve left the children with grandma as they attempt to mend their relationship – turns into a genuine house of horror. As she slowly fades in an upstairs bedroom he is left to make sense of the madness creeping inexorably closer to his door…

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Combining the nervous energy of a classic zombie flick – think Night of the Living Dead transplanted to Hebden Bridge – with a Ken Loachian portrait of a crumbling marriage, this is a bold and frequently bloody attempt to give the genre a twist.

Brunt (also the director) is not afraid of firing off into uncharted territory. This is a bleak and unforgiving landscape – worlds away from the familiarity of a Hollywood epic where the men are Special Forces superheroes and armed to the teeth. Brunt’s Everyman has no guns. He’s a loser, out of his depth and engulfed in a lost love. Being flung headlong into a zombie apocalypse was not part of his plan.

Frequently edgy, finely balancing moments of slow-burn domesticity with frighteningly energetic horror (a stand-off in a garage is both frenetic and terrifyingly claustrophobic) and shocking in its implications of what people will do when blinded by mad love, Before Dawn is powerfully original. It is also sufficiently gory, boasting an array of impressive make-up effects, to satisfy even the hardest of zombie buffs.

On limited release

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