Outside (2024)

‘Outside’ begins promisingly, as zombie films tend to do.

In this case, the film's survivors are members of an archetypal family consisting of a man, a woman and two children.

In one of the first sequences, the father Francis (Sid Lucero) has to execute his parents, who have been infected.

Beyond its initial impact, this scene also establishes the unusual rules of a zombie story.

First, these zombies neither lose nor gain physical abilities, so they can run, jump and perform arbitrary movements as if they had never been transformed. In addition, they talk.

Specifically, each zombie is tagged with a unique phrase that it repeats incessantly (some say something like ‘run “ or ”run away’, and others say ‘sorry “ or ”thank you’). So far, so good.

However, the character of Iris (Bella González), the mother of this family, shows that the knot goes in a different direction. This woman is like an old cliché.

She seems unhappy with everything, especially with what her husband is doing. After another dramatic scene on the bridge, in which the heroes encounter another group of zombies, the family escapes to the farm.

Through flashbacks that resemble nightmares, ‘There’ begins to reveal that Francis has suffered childhood trauma . His father abused him, beat him or something.

Then, gradually, his appearance began to morph into this distant memory. The zombies were omitted and the film became the story of the survival of a mother and her two children locked up under the care of a mentally ill man.

Outside, a film-flick, wastes its interesting beginning to become something else. The same story could have been told without the zombies, and perhaps the end result would have been more worthy. What the film does is practically a hoax. It is a zombie film without zombies. Or, worse, where the zombies don't matter.