Maggie Review

There’s a moment in the daisy field of Henry Hobson’s Maggie where Maggie (Abigail Breslin) begs her father Wade Vogel (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to please make the pain of ‘the turn’ stop and kill her and all I could think was YES! please make this painfully slow film stop and if not, please put me out of my misery by killing me first.

Alas, neither of us were that lucky but as the final credits rolled and I awoke from the film’s induced catalepsy, I slowly began to appreciate -despite it’s snail paced everything- just how ballsy this cross-genre debut feature really is.

It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but if you do fancy a challenge, it’s nice to at least go in somewhat prepared for the extremely delicate observation of terminal illness and the emotional toil it inflicts within a family.

Known for his credit sequences for films such as Snow White and the Huntsman and The Walking Dead, Hobson’s world is in the midst of a zombie outbreak due to a necro-ambulatory virus known as ‘the turn’. As fear and paranoia begin to grip the city, Wade sets out to find his missing daughter Maggie and take her back to their picturesque farm in America’s Midwest. It’s a staid, beige hued palette complementary to the film’s thematics however, cinematographer Lukas Ettlin (The Lincoln Lawyer) manages to create beautiful vantage points that highlight the richness and complexity within this new dystopic world.

And it’s not the only surprise one is able to observe from the film. Schwarzenegger’s sincere portrayal of Wade is impressively unshowy and the most real I think I’ve ever seen him in a film. Stripped away from his Austrian intonation accents thanks to writer John Scott’s minimalist dialogue, this stripped back Schwarzenegger is endearing, personable and a far cry from his action alter ego. So too is Abigail Breslin whose solid and thoughtful performance of a young woman dying a slow, unimaginable death still manages to exude the right amount of teenage angst and love like when she’s looking at her petrifying flesh in the mirror as if she’s just had a breakout.

It’s also interesting to note that there is only one lyrical song throughout the entire movie – Oscar Brown Jnr’s Maggie – a familial homage to the love and close relationship between a father and their daughter and a nice interlude from the film’s disjointed non-diegetic sound.

If given the choice to leave Maggie in cinematic quarantine or to take her on at the risk of watching a slow and prolonged death, I’d take the quarantine but for those gutsy enough to roll the dice and take a chance – good luck to you.

Maggie is out in UK cinemas now.