Adam McDonald’s This Is Not a Test sees a group of teenagers under siege from 28 Days Later-style fast zombies—the kind that come tearing after their victims, all flailing limbs and guttural war cries. The film brings the undead to life, so to speak, with some solid make-up work, and the story is filled with imaginatively gory bits of action. Unfortunately, it has a much harder time trying to bring its non-zombie characters to life.
Adapted from Courtney Summers’s young adult novel, the film revolves around a group of teens who barricade themselves inside their high school after their town is overrun by the undead. This premise sets This Is Not a Test up to be a zombie-infested spin on The Breakfast Club, where a ragtag group of kids slowly reveal their true selves and grow closer while trapped in a seemingly endless detention. Except that this film’s characters have nothing much to reveal.
The teens here are barely fleshed out beyond their familiar outlines. If Rhys (Froy Gutierrez) is the nice guy, then Trace (Carson MacCormac) is the not-so-nice guy. Then there’s Cary (Corteon Moore), the self-appointed leader of the group, whose strong-headedness is sure to be a liability right up until he learns to listen to others. While the performances can be a little wooden, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting much out of the script’s awkward, lifeless dialogue.
When it comes to its protagonist, Sloane (Olivia Holt), the film seems to try to compensate for the overall lack of depth to the characterizations elsewhere by burdening her with an ungodly amount of trauma. She has a dead mother, an abusive father (Jeff Roop), and a sister (Joelle Farrow) who naturally would rather be anywhere else but home. The film even begins with Sloane on the brink of committing suicide. It would be difficult for even the most seasoned actor to play such a complex web of miseries even in a film where they didn’t spend most of the runtime running from flesh-eating monsters. At least The Breakfast Club gave Bender the space to work through his cigar-burn situation without a pack of werewolves chapping on the door.
On screen, the basic structure of This Is Not a Test also works against it. The first third of McDonald’s film is told in non-linear fashion, bouncing between the cooped-up kids and the events immediately following the zombie outbreak. We learn nothing of value from these cutaways, and they release all of the claustrophobic tension of a single-location siege movie.
And whether the audience discovers it through flashbacks or from the conversations between the teens inside the school, no aspect of their lives or relationships comes into the story in any sort of meaningful way. Friendships aren’t fractured, nor are rivalries re-examined under the harsh new circumstances that the characters find themselves in.
The high school setting gave This Is Not a Test the opportunity to put a novel twist on the zombie genre, namely by mixing the social complexities of teenage life with horror thrills. But as the teens here come across as strangers to one another, and the story could just as easily have taken place anywhere else, all that intriguing potential is sadly squandered.
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Got to see this last fall and liked it waaaaaaaaaay more than you. thought it felt real in a way that sets it apart. like you wanted it to be more cliche??? john hughes kids. that’s not what it is and what makes it so raw. not about the siege it’s about the quiet.