The zombie horror subgenre usually requires daring reimagining to really feel recent once more. Regardless of being well-versed within the style — with movies like Out Come the Wolves, Slasher, and Hell Motel beneath his directorial belt — Adam MacDonald apparently seems unconvinced on this truth. His newest movie, This Is Not a Check, suggests a filmmaker content material to function throughout the acquainted confines of the horror style fairly than push past them.
An adaptation of Courtney Summers’ younger grownup novel of the identical identify, This Is Not a Check is one zombie-traumatized teen movie too many, even because it superbly explores the societal and ethical breakdown that emerges when survival is left to adolescents. It’s a tragic and nearly laughable non-linear narrative that, in concept, ought to have a worthy factor or two to say about rising up beneath strain and its affect on the innocence and ethical fragility of youth.
This Is Not A Check Makes Adults Out of Budding Teenagers
A dysfunctional dwelling, courtesy of an abusive father and an absent older sister Lily (Joelle Farrow) — who fled that abuse — already seems like an apocalypse for any teenager. That’s precisely what protagonist Sloane (Olivia Holt) thinks in This Is Not A Check. That perspective quickly takes a flip when the suburb-turned-90s city of Cortez, the place she calls dwelling, is overrun with zombies.
MacDonald levels the outbreak with visible aptitude: shiny crimson blood stains pale white snow, and the refrain of zombie shrieks slices by way of an A Quiet Place-esque silence — the zombies are to noise what flies are to campfire. Sloane and associates Hint (Carson McCormac), Grace (Chloe Avakian), Cary (Corteon Moore), and Rhys (Froy Gutierrez) discover refuge of their college.
Bereft of grownup supervision and decision-making, the kids do what they know greatest: lead by emotion when the scenario calls for pragmatism, and be led by pragmatism when a sprinkle of emotion is required. Cary appears to be the one one daring sufficient to make robust choices: “We now have to do issues we don’t wish to do, if we’re gonna make it,” he insists. However consensus proves elusive.
This Is Not A Check Has No Particular Message
This Is Not A Check’s title suggests brutal confrontation with actuality. To be honest, this does occur. Sloane is one zombie-led homicide away from reaching breaking level. Her ache is already sufficient for an adolescent; her first sight of uncooked violence comes from her father. Now, she has to look at associates, household, and strangers alike get munched by the undead.
One would suppose these near-death experiences would drive a mature shift in her perspective, because the psychological groundwork for profound character evolution is all there. Nevertheless it by no means does, not for Sloane or anybody else. At no level does Cary’s hardened pragmatism reshape the group’s ethical compass, a improvement that will later repay in fascinating methods. The movie circles round heavy themes of trauma and survival ethics with out touchdown on a coherent stance.
Olivia Holt is the Faint Silver Lining of This Is Not A Check
Holt, no stranger to style fare after appearances in Coronary heart Eyes and Completely Killer, commits absolutely to Sloane’s anguish. She superbly delivers the style sweet within the type of visceral screams and trembling vulnerability, apt for a personality who sleeps to the sound of zombies clawing their manner right into a supposedly safe refuge and has been an unfortunate witness to multiple zombie feeding frenzy. That is so, even when the script reduces her to muted despair for lengthy stretches.
Corteon Moore (viewers can acknowledge him as Ellis Stevens from From), whose uncanny resemblance to a younger Barack Obama is momentarily distracting, brings a measured cool to Cary. His calm, nearly brazen demeanor suggests deeper character dynamism than the screenplay in the end permits. In the long run, one is left questioning what precisely audiences are meant to remove from the This Is Not A Check expertise past trendy blood splatter and a pointy punk-rock soundtrack.
- Launch Date
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February 20, 2026
- Runtime
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102 minutes
- Director
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Adam MacDonald
- Writers
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Adam MacDonald, Courtney Summers
- Producers
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Cybill Lui, Adam MacDonald
Forged
