Maggie
Director: Henry Hobson
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson
Three stars
How would you react if your child was slowly dying of a gruesome and highly contagious illness? That's the central question that Arnold Schwarzenegger has to face in Maggie, a terminal-illness drama in which the malady in question just happens to involve the victim morphing into a member of the flesh-eating undead.
Director Henry Hobson’s film imagines a world devastated by zombies – although, as seems to be a trend in film and television these days, no one actually ever uses the word.
Instead of falling into genre conventions, though, Maggie stays small, intimate and fascinatingly realistic.
Set in a small Midwestern town, society is still tenuously functioning amid the breakout. Hospitals diagnose the afflicted and impose mandatory quarantines before the diseased can turn truly dangerous. The police are there to enforce the rules. Other institutions, though, are all but abandoned. Petrol stations are empty and electricity is unreliable.
For many, life continues as normally as possible. There are no rogue bands of hostile survivalists competing over bunkers and land (we’re looking at you, The Walking Dead) and no massive zombie armies attacking (this is not World War Z). Maggie is a zombie tale that is more interested in the microcosm – the effects of the virus on the family unit and the community, not the shocks and thrills of an all-out war.
If this seems like a surprising choice for Schwarzenegger, it is. Even more surprising? He’s pretty great.
The heart of the movie is the relationship between Wade (Schwarzenegger) and his teenage daughter, Maggie (Abigail Breslin). She’s infected and missing when the film starts, but Wade finds her and brings her to the home he shares with his new wife (Joely Richardson) and their children.
There, Wade waits for Maggie to transform, trying to spend as much time with her as possible while he can. Maggie, in turn, fluctuates between all the emotions of dealing with a life cut too short and her fatal, grotesque wound.
There are a few jump scares and horror-movie elements that help to break up the melodrama. Maggie’s carefully designed physical transformation is punctuated by frightening visions of what’s to come – even if it’s unclear whether they are nightmares or symptoms. Still, everything is fairly restrained. Schwarzenegger’s Wade only resorts to violence when protecting Maggie, and even those moments seem to be reluctant. His despair is evident in his physicality and his eyes throughout.
Many of the scenes take place around the dinner table. Some are tense, some are funny – but they all weigh heavy with the fear of the inevitable hanging over every moment.
Some of the more affecting scenes involve Schwarzenegger weighing his options with friends. The horrifying reality is that death is the only solution. The only question is how?
And yet, as fascinating as the conceit is (and as lean as the movie is), the deep emotions at play don't really hit home as well as they should. Part of the problem is the distracting look of the film. Maggie looks like it was shot through a variety of Instagram filters – dusty grey for the exteriors, warm, oversaturated orange for the interiors.
Also, even at 95 minutes, the runtime feels like a stretch. Maybe Hobson – a title designer making his feature-directing debut – wasn’t going for tear-jerker, though.
Maggie, ultimately, is a fascinating experiment in genre that has captured a side of Schwarzenegger that the movies have not seen before – an impressive, exciting and worthy accomplishment in and of itself.
