Zombiosis: Final Girls Berlin Review

10th February 2020

Short films are a rigged lottery, you’ll win more than you lose, but when you lose you’ll be utterly baffled. Cris Gambin and Toni Pinel’s Zombiosis was a loss, and my jaw has yet to be picked up off the floor.

It’s near impossible to review something so short, so I will keep it quite brief.

Zombiosis follows a woman (Lara Vacas) surviving the zombie apocalypse while trying to keep her, now zombie, husband alive by killing and taking the brains of other survivors to feed to him. As she does, she struggles to maintain her grip on reality and starts to slip into to seeing things as if she were in the past again; when she was much happier and sane.

This all leads to a bloody and garish conclusion that manages to be disturbing and yet entirely unimpactful. Short films must have a message or a purpose, even a minor one. Zombiosis is just an over-stylised shell of a short film that seems not even to try to get any emotion across. Are you even supposed to feed zombies, aren’t they already dead?

The concept itself has an inherent power, the struggle to let go is innately human and a legitimate barrier for so many people around the world. The Walking Dead grapples with this issue regularly, and every time it has been better than this.

Short films take time and thought and cohesion. You can’t just have a fundamental idea, film it exactly as you thought it up and then release it to the world, that will rarely work. To stand out in what is an incredibly talented crowed you have to try and stand out, at the very least that’s a good first step.

Zombiosis fails to inspire any emotion and only makes you want to look away in the worst possible sense. Any sense of focus could have at least defined this short as something of substance, but as is it’s a gimmick that has no real-time where it would make sense or be worth watching.

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