a review of 我的僵尸女友

Hooptober, Night Twenty and 2020 Cult Movie Challenge Week 41: Zombie Week This one was a last-minute substitute for The Return of the Living Dead (which mysteriously disappeared from my streaming selection, but I will try to seek it out for later) and I'm honestly kind of divided on it. I appreciated the movie's slow-burn approach to finding out the full deal with the title character, and the way Aubrey Plaza plays her in the more lucid moments gives you arguably enough of the baseline version of Beth as the main character's girlfriend. And when she finally tips over into full-zombie mode, Plaza feels genuinely dangerous in a way that doesn't get fully tapped in most of her other roles. But I thought Dane DeHaan was weirdly miscast here, insofar as he felt less like a hapless comedic foil for Plaza's rapidly encroaching monstrosity and more like a character who had dropped in from a weepy romantic drama. Listening to the dialogue, I couldn't help but feel like this character was written for more of an oblivious Michael Cera type but for some reason the filmmakers decided to go for actual pathos instead of absurdity. And since so much of the movie is processed through this character's POV, it sort of knocked everything else out of balance.