The zombie romance “Warm Bodies” is cute and amusing enough to catch on cable one day, where its star-crossed, blood-drenched lovers will eventually present sweet relief from the apocalyptic freakout that is the AMC series “The Walking Dead.” If “The Walking Dead” is “Lost” with zombies and a high kill rate, “Warm Bodies” is effectively a riff on every teenage romance ever told, from Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe on. Boy or, in this case, zombie meets girl. Zombie loses girl. Zombie — well, you know the rest, though here the familiar balance comes with human tartare, screams and the unsettling image of John Malkovich as the leader of the seemingly last people on Earth.
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine (“50/50”), “Warm Bodies” is an improbable romance sweetened with appealing performances and buoyed by one of the better cute meets in recent romantic comedy, when the zombie boy, R (Nicholas Hoult), decides not to eat a live girl, Julie (Teresa Palmer). And she looks so tasty too, a Kristen Stewart type with less fidgeting and a sense of self-preservation. (She’s out scouting, looking for something nonhuman to eat.) Smitten or stricken, R drops everything — in this case, a half-gnawed corpse — and stares into her eyes, where intelligence battles fear. He then smears blood on her face to fool his zombie brethren (Rob Corddry included) into thinking that she’s dead, grunts a few sweet nothings and shuffles off, taking her to his lair.
Freud described the oral stage of early psychosexual development as “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization.” In this stage, he elaborated, “sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food.” In order for there to be a story R must learn to keep his monstrous appetite in check so that he can be with Julie and not just consume her. He learns, in other words, to separate sexual activity from gobbling brains. (Real Freudians should feel free to parse how this zombie boy handles the other stages.) In story terms that means R hangs out with Julie inside the jet that he has turned into his dead-man cave and in which they listen to his vinyl records. They sound, he explains, alive.
“Warm Bodies” began as a short story, “I Am a Zombie Filled With Love,” that its author, Isaac Marion, expanded into a novel, also titled “Warm Bodies,” which earned praise from Stephenie Meyer (the author of the “Twilight” books) and led, inevitably, to a movie deal. Given that Summit Entertainment, the company releasing “Warm Bodies,” also turned Ms. Meyer’s “Twilight” books into a global screen phenomenon, it seems it has decided that romances between sort of dead boys and living girls is a niche it can fill. The resurrection of the vampire as the ultimate suave lover has its understandable appeal. A boy-man like Edward in the “Twilight” series may be dead, but he has old-fashioned manners and, unlike his flesh-and-blood contemporaries, is in control of his hunger.
R is less obviously appealing than Edward, both less worldly and courtly, yet also more recognizable. R keeps his hunger in check without much struggle, a process that’s personalized through his voice-over and in talky passages that show Mr. Levine’s ability to sustain interest with just two people in a room. (Dave Franco and Analeigh Tipton help round out the cast.) The off-the-shelf action scenes mostly involve someone, dead or alive, chasing someone else, who’s dead or alive, including armies of cheap-looking digital ghouls. Like the story, these scenes are familiar if not deadly, despite the nuance-killing music. If the movie surmounts its genericism, it’s largely because of the actors and a love in which the monstrous has been made literal, and violent delights don’t necessarily lead to violent ends.
Culled from New York Times
