In short: The Dustwalker (2019)

Something that may be a meteorite or may be something just a tiny bit worse goes down near a small town in the Australian Outback. Shortly thereafter, something damages the dishes responsible for the town’s cellphone traffic, isolating the community right when people start getting infected by something that turns them into the creepy starer/occasional murderous shouty runner type of infected. Well, they also like to jump, but the less said about that, the better.

That’s not all, though. A big, bug-like monster is also starting to make regular appearances. Which would be a bit of a spoiler if the cover and one-sheet didn’t show it already. Local authority Joanne Sharp (Jolene Anderson) has got her work cut out for her.

For the first half, perhaps two thirds of its running time, I was pleasantly surprised by Sandra Sciberras’s (who directed and scripted) variation on the old, worn-out zombie apocalypse. It’s the sort of film you wouldn’t exactly call original (because you will have seen most of the elements at play here in one movie or another before), but that approaches the state of originality by putting the emphasis on other elements than most films of its genre do. To wit, where most of the film’s contemporaries go for zombie masses and a survivalist, heavily armed approach, this one’s more interested in the more personal horror of a situation where friends, relatives and acquaintances – and in a town this small, everyone is one or the other – suddenly turn at first creepy and then feral. Why, the characters are even repeatedly discussing if their increasingly violent handling of the infected is actually ethically correct. They don’t, after all, know if this isn’t a perfectly curable disease and they are basically slaughtering the sick.

As long as the film stays with this sort of thing, it manages to create a decent amount of suspense, making much of moments like a man with bloody hands staring creepily at people and suggesting a lot of the violence it can’t afford to show pretty effectively. Scriberas also makes good use of the natural feeling of isolation of its outback locale, adding another degree of tension to the zombie business.

Alas, the final act can’t really hold to what the rest of the film promised. There’s a good, and certainly interesting enough, core idea surrounding the increasingly important large monster, but the film also needs to show way too much of a pretty terrible special effect to actually put that idea into plot, and loses most of its tension while trying to sell its audience on its big idea. Worse, the otherwise solid editing also starts to slacken in the final third, what amounts to the film’s big climactic set piece falling flat because the rhythm of the whole affair has become completely off.


But hey, two thirds of a good little genre film is more than the Michael Bays of this world have ever achieved in a whole career, so I’m not going to complain too loudly here.