92 min | R | October 16, 2020 | Lionsgate
A pandemic turns the population into raging zombies and traps a slacker alone in his apartment. He has no food, no plan, and a dwindling phone battery. The siege is real. The movie is not.
A viral outbreak sweeps a city and turns the infected into screaming, sprinting attackers. Aidan is a young man who wakes up to the collapse from inside his high-rise apartment. He films it, barricades the door, and rations a few cans of food while the building fills with the dead. The premise asks how long a person survives confinement, hunger, and the temptation to give up. This is an English-language remake of a Korean film, and it never finds a reason to exist beyond that source.
Tyler Posey plays Aidan as a passive observer of his own siege. He reacts, panics, and films, but the character has no interior life for Posey to mine. Summer Spiro plays Eva, the survivor in the apartment across the way, and the two trade signs and gestures through their windows. The flirtation across the gap is the only human thread the film offers. Donald Sutherland appears briefly as Edward, a neighbor with a sick wife and a calm menace, and he gives the film its single moment of weight before vanishing from it.
Johnny Martin directs from a script by Matt Naylor, and the staging works against the claustrophobia. The camera roams the apartment with a freedom that drains tension from a one-room siege. The infected are shot in fast, blurry bursts that hide the makeup and the choreography rather than reveal them. The sound design leans on stingers and screaming where silence and scarcity would do more. The editing rushes the timeline so the hunger and isolation never accumulate into dread.
The film moves through the beats of a survival thriller without committing to any of them. Aidan’s despair arrives and lifts on schedule, and the threat resets each time the plot needs a jolt. The ending arrives abruptly and resolves nothing that the setup promised. This is a competent copy of a better film that strips out the desperation and keeps only the noise.