#Alive

Oh Joon-Woo (Yoo Ah-in) loves being by himself and spends his time live streaming the video games he constantly plays. He's a young man sharing an apartment building in Seoul with his sister and parents but he's much happier in a digital world than the real one. Sadly reality hits him like a kick in the stones one day when an unknown and fast moving contagion ravages the Korean capital, turning it's populace cannibalistic and Oh Joon-Woo finds himself alone in the family apartment, an apartment that's about to become his world. Being alone isn't so appealing when you're actually alone. Soon enough food is running low and the water gets turned off. Oh Joon is about to lose all hope when he realises he isn't the only person in the city who's zombified.

Yup. Zombies. The Z word. Another one.

It's all George A. Romero's fault. In the space of a year we got a brilliant remake of his masterpiece 'Dawn Of The Dead' and then we got his latest addition to the dead series 'Land Of The Dead' and since then there's been an unstoppable onslaught of zombie films that's showing no sign of abating. Dozens, if not hundreds of films have been made about the living dead since (including the magnificent Korean one Train To Busan and it's upcoming sequel Peninsula), numerous tv shows, computer games, the lot. We should be sick to the backteeth of them by now but for some reason we ain't. Like those mouldy, rotten corpses onscreen we keep coming back and now with this new Korean horror film #Alive we've a new addition to the canon. A new addition that comes at things from a different angle than usual.

Yeah all the tropes and cliches of a living dead film are present and correct but #Alive is more about the pyschological impact of a zombie apocalypse on it's survivors. You're alone, you know escape is pointless, you're surrounded by inevitable death but unwilling to dive into it. The internet is no good when there's no one to reply to you. You've all the time in the world to ponder how your family and friends died and worse is the fact that they are still out there wandering, aimlessly, looking to do to others what happened to them. That cannot be good for the brain and poor Oh Joon-Woo goes through the gamut of emotion and Yoo Ah-in plays the part perfectly. At first enjoying the freedom brought to his door before falling into a pit of despair before a blast of hope in the form of ...... well that would be telling...... sees his personality opening up in a way it's never done before. And all it took was a horrific contagion. Awwww.

It might sound like a hard watch but plenty of crunchy carnage, dark humour and inventive use of hobbies keep things moving along sprightly. As the film progresses you'll be laughing in disbelief, giddy with nerves and in places genuinely fearful for our protagonist as the growling, snarling, disturbingly designed living dead start to catch wind of his plans. These aren't your common or garden shuffling zombies, oh no, these ones are fast, deadly, climbing zombies, the kind that will really fuck up your day. 

Fast moving, contagion, pandemic, apocalypse.....these words have all taken on a horrible significance in 2020 and some may find even the prospect of this film offputting in the current climate but what made it watchable for me was it's depiction of human inventiveness, how even a glimmer of hope can help us through the worst of times. How going through hell can make you totally re-evaluate all our long held ideals. You might have seen the flesh eating and head cracking a million times before but the undercurrent of optimism might be just what the doctor ordered.

#Alive is streaming on Netflix now. Make sure you've a few packs of Koka noodles for afterwards too. Believe me you'll be craving them.