Yang Hae-sung/Netflix
The inherent terror of zombie fiction stems from the truth that as soon as a plague emerges, it spreads at an exponential price, rendering containment a near-impossibility. In our present pandemic period, that concept has acutely unnerving resonance, and it’s exploited to suspenseful impact by All of Us Are Lifeless, author Chun Sung-il and director Lee JQ’s 12-part Netflix collection (out now) about an undead outbreak that originates from, and shortly engulfs, South Korea’s Hyosan Excessive College. Primarily happening inside that confined setting, and but staged on an enormously monstrous scale, it’s a vigorous marriage of unholy horror and teenage drama, the latter of which solely complicates its protagonists’ makes an attempt to outlive what seems to be the tip of the world.
The catalyst for All of Us Are Lifeless is teen bullying, and particularly the agony inflicted upon Jin-su (Lee Min-goo), which is so dangerous that his science instructor father Mr. Lee (Kim Byung-chul) makes an attempt to counter it with an experimental drug that may bestow his son with enhanced power. That plan, alas, goes horribly mistaken, begetting a rageful virus that proliferates as soon as an contaminated mouse in Mr. Lee’s faculty laboratory bites a younger woman, who then gnaws on a nurse, who promptly runs amok within the hallways, chomping on others—thus initiating a cascading wave of pestilence. It’s a disaster that expands with swift ferocity and compels a gaggle of children to gap up in a classroom to determine what’s all of a sudden occurred, and the way they could keep away from the identical destiny as their now-ravenously hungry and roaring fellow college students.
On the head of this makeshift class are Cheong-san (Yoon Chan-young) and On-jo (Park Ji-hoo), lifelong buddies who everybody thinks are a pair, largely as a result of Cheong-san actually does have emotions for On-jo. Sadly for him, although, On-jo has eyes for hunky Su-hyeok (Park Solomon), a reformed bully who appreciates On-jo’s curiosity however is definitely smitten with aloof class president Nam-ra (Cho Yi-hyun). Theirs is a traditional highschool romantic dynamic, and it’s complemented by a spread of extra characters and conflicts, together with the strain between Cheong-san’s mate Gyeong-su (Ham Sung-min) and snobby Na-yeon (Lee Yoo-mi, of Squid Sport), the goofy rapport shared by heavyset Dae-su (Im Jae-hyuk) and constant Wu-jin (Son Sang-yeon), and the uneasy partnership struck by Wu-jin’s sister Ha-ri (Ha Seung-ri)—an ace archer who’s simply did not qualify for the nationwide staff, thus costing her a shot at a university scholarship—and brash Mi-jin (Lee Eun-saem), who meet in a toilet in the course of the preliminary chaos.
All of Us Are Lifeless fleshes out its story with much more key gamers, together with Cheong-san’s mother (Lee Ji-hyun), who runs a fried hen restaurant named after her solely youngster, On-jo’s firefighter dad (Jeon Bae-soo), English instructor Ms. Park (Lee Sang-hee), and—most troublesome of all—nasty Gwi-nam (Yoo In-soo), the right-hand henchman to Hyosan Excessive’s chief bully. Gwi-nam, who tormented Jin-su in addition to suicidal Eun-ji (Oh Hye-soo), is a tyrannical creep straight out of a Stephen King novel. After being caught perpetrating a heinous crime, he trains his vengeful consideration on Cheong-san, culminating with a showdown in a faculty library on prime of unsteady bookshelves that present a little bit of distance between them and the realm’s speedy, single-minded zombies. On this sequence, as in quite a few others, Lee JQ’s course is fleet and serpentine, his digicam zooming round bodily areas with a velocity that by no means hampers visible lucidity.
All of Us Are Lifeless’s carnage happens in quite a lot of typical faculty places (instructor’s places of work, broadcasting rooms, storage closets, gymnasiums, tennis courts, the cafeteria), the place its characters take affordable, level-headed measures to guard themselves from imminent hazard. Hardly ever does anybody do one thing head-smackingly silly throughout this ordeal, which works hand-in-hand with the truth that Chun Sung-il and Lee JQ’s collection is a self-aware zombie affair, as confirmed by one scholar’s early reference to Yeon Sang-ho’s Practice to Busan. Later mayhem shot from troopers’ POVs remembers Name of Obligation: World at Conflict: Zombies, whereas metropolis scenes are harking back to Resident Evil,additional highlighting the present’s upfront embrace of widespread style fiction, and its want to have its heroes act, and react, in a fashion that’s knowledgeable by their data of zombie lore.
Teen romance, jealousy, rivalry, resentment and judgmental meanness all play basic roles in All of Us Are Lifeless, as do concurrent needs for acceptance, compassion and camaraderie. Given the origins of its zombie madness, the collection additionally capabilities as a portrait of how ignoring minor violence can result in mass calamity. Extra well timed nonetheless, some characters’ refusal to confess that they’ve been bitten—regardless of the hazardous ramifications that call may have for these of their neighborhood, as soon as they flip into the undead—captures an all-too-familiar sense of individuals’s willingness to cling to delusions regardless of the dangers it poses to others. COVID-19 is just fleetingly talked about throughout this 12-hour saga, however its specter looms massive over the supernatural motion, given how quarantine craziness, ruthless selfishness, and worry of widespread an infection programs via its veins.
Yang Hae-sung/Netflix
Half teen cleaning soap opera, half sprawling nightmare, All of Us Are Lifeless advantages from the sheer scope of its massacre. Each different scene is marked by dozens—if no more—of raving zombies racing via hallways, throughout fields and into barricades making an attempt to satiate their starvation, such that its protagonists’ moment-to-moment predicaments regularly really feel borderline hopeless. Chun Sung-il and Lee JQ hold the fabric flowing from one distinctive locale to the subsequent, all whereas creating and intertwining their college students’ fraught relationships, which mutate in even pricklier methods as soon as a brand new pressure of the virus surfaces—making detection harder, and in addition posing new survival challenges—and the army intervenes in a determined bid to cease the contagion from consuming the nation.
At a sure level, the proceedings do fall prey to a little bit of exhausting repetition, vacillating as they do between teen squabbles and battles in opposition to swarms of voracious reanimated corpses who care solely about sinking their enamel into necks, arms, and legs. Then once more, All of Us Are Lifeless makes a compelling, and infrequently thrilling, case that a viral apocalypse would finally grow to be greater than a bit monotonous—one thing that everybody in the true world can seemingly relate to proper now.