Maggie movie review

Schwarzenegger’s Wade finds Breslin’s Maggie in a hospital after she has run away from home, presumably after being infected by a zombie bite. The doctor is a friend and so Maggie is released into Wade’s custody, with the instruction that she be brought back into quarantine should she get worse.

From that point on, Hobson’s film makes a heartwarming departure from films that reduce living people to lifeless zombies without a step in between. The debutant director sets up Maggie’s return, her interaction with her smaller siblings, her relationship with her nervous stepmother Caroline, and particularly Wade with tension, gloom and pervading grief and fear. Every meal is a moment of dread, as one of the signs Maggie may be turning worse is her losing her appetite, and every scene of her close up against another person is fraught with the prospect of her attacking them. They know it, she knows it, and she knows they know it.

The house, lonely in the middle of fields burnt to kill the infection leading to “necroambulism”, is full of dark corners with creaky wooden floors and seldom any electricity connection. It’s a hard place, one can see, made easier by the simple fact of people choosing to live there.

We get full-blown infected, and how the town deals with them; we get teens half-way there, and how their parents cope with that; and we get decent people caught up between doing the right thing and not doing it for the wrong reasons.

If there is an issue with Maggie, it is how Hobson can’t stop infusing his film with “atmosphere”. Here is a film daring to stare at the living dead up close and, for a rare time, personal, and the director keeps stepping back to give us that shot of the fields, the crops, the top of the corn stalks, and sunlight playing through them. We know what Maggie has to do, and Wade, and yet the film puts off facing that as long as it can.

There is no sight more haunting here than when Maggie looks into the mirror and grey, pupil-less eyes stare back at her. But then Caroline takes her face between her hands lovingly, and looks deep within. Maggie could do with more such faith.

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson
Director: Henry Hobson