[Chattanooga Film Festival Review] WINTERTIDE

Make-killable is a term used to describe the actions or mental gymnastics people take to justify viewing another person as expendable. Where do people draw the line when it comes to ending a life? Is a staggering undead zombie with no discernable thoughts other than the desire to eat people really still human? How about a similar situation but the people are still alive? Do we protect the uninfected in hopes of a cure? In a colorless frozen world, the dimly lit city streets barely light the way down the barely plowed roads. For someone like me who hails from the frozen tundra that is in Wisconsin, this dark and icy hellscape resembles home. However, the reason the people in John Barnard’s WINTERTIDE only experience cold and snow is that the sun no longer shines.

98 days ago, all-natural light disappeared and now the perpetual night takes a physical and mental toll on the dwindling population. With no sun, a human’s circadian rhythm becomes disrupted which affects sleep, memory, cognitive function, and a whole slew of mental processing limitations. Not to mention how a severe vitamin D deficiency can just wreak havoc on the skeletal structure. All of these combine to create a debilitating depression that eventually leads to staggering zombies roaming the streets.

Beth (Niamh Carolan) works as a volunteer tasked with the chore of reporting anyone infected by the depression-like plague. The story combines elements of pandemic horror with a post-apocalyptic zombie journey, but the overall theme of the story goes much deeper than the shoot-em-in-the-head bloodbath narrative. Traditional zombies fall into the category of the undead, however, WINTERTIDE’s stumbling menaces are still alive.

An apocalyptic world with zombie-like creatures does not break the mold movie-wise, but Barnard takes a very different approach as he looks at the dehumanization of the infected. Anyone who catches the illness tries to harm others, but they are still human, so how should they be treated? Should they go into isolation? Or even exterminated? Some of the able-bodied characters refer to the affected as “things” or “strays” in an attempt to dehumanize them, and therefore harm them. While other members of the uninfected fight to maintain normality.

Beth and her best friend Natalie (Solange Sookram) fight for the humane treatment of the Strays despite many higher-ups seeing the shuffling seemingly unthinking bodies as merely something to observe and use in experiments. And while wanting to treat a fellow human like a human might seem obvious, Beth’s reason for protecting the contaminated people comes from a deeper place. To help fill the mind-numbing boredom that is the end of the world, she fills her time with meaningless hook-ups. Only to discover her one-night stands soon appear wandering the streets with a slack-jawed expression. Could Beth be Typhoid Mary? Or is there more to her connection with the newly infected?

The acting, the atmosphere, and the score keep the story moving along, but it appears the metaphor behind the movie might be grander than what WINTERTIDE could handle. Early in the film, the director appears to comment on the treatment of the ill and disabled but seems to lose this thread, or at least contradict itself. Throughout the film, we see a heavy reliance on over-medication and institutionalization, all of which make this film more of a slow-burn mystery than the typical blood and guts zombie attack.

WINTERTIDE played as a part of the 2023 Chattanooga Film Festival.