#Alive (2020)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

One falls in love easily with the two heroes of Cho Il-hyung's zombie picture #ALIVE, but the trouble with the film is that it doesn't really allow them to fall in love with each other.

Yoo Ah-in as the guy and Park Shin-hye as the girl make a great couple; the last survivors in their apartment complex of a zombie outbreak. 

The zombies are fast and deadly. This could be a companion tale to TRAIN TO BUSAN. That film kept moving, with the train. This has the heroes trapped in their apartments across the way from each other, fighting hunger and boredom, and the distance between them. How to get from here to there.

Which means this is a love film, NOT a zombie picture. 

Or rather, it should have been a love film. 

Instead, it wants to be about the zombies and the characters' predicament, a will-they-survive-or-won't-they? but... BUT... for the film to work and feel fulfilling, the storytellers should have listened to the heartbeat of their own tale.

There's only so much you can do with zombie-survivalism. After a while, you have to return to the people, the characters.

This is a meet-cute writ large. With the undead in attendance. And so, in spite of moving at a pace and being sparky and looking dynamic, #ALIVE feels disappointing.