Film Review: Warm Bodies

A handsome non-human creature falls in vaguely stalker-ish love with a human girl with an overprotective father. On the surface, it sounds a lot like Twilight. But Warm Bodies is actually good, and not just because Nicholas Hoult plays a nearly-speechless zombie with more emotional range than Kristen Stewart was ever able to give Bella.

Hoult plays R, a zombie who can’t remember anything about his human life except for the first letter of his name. His inner monologue makes him seem almost human, except for the cravings to devour live human flesh, which he does unflinchingly. That’s actually how he meets love-interest Julie (Teresa Palmer). He kills her boyfriend, and then he eats his brain, which imparts all of his memories to R, including those of Julie. He instantly falls in love and kidnaps her.

I wasn’t expecting much from Warm Bodies besides seeing that guy from Skins look pretty and do a zombie-like shuffle while some girl pined over his hidden humanity. Fortunately, only one of those was the case. Julie isn’t the typical damsel in distress, hopelessly in love with someone who is no good for her. She knows that R is no good, and if it weren’t for the “bonies” (more-dead-than-zombies, defleshed skeletons with superhuman running ability) she would have escaped. Watching smitten R try to woo terrified Julie—after all, he did eat her boyfriend’s brains—provides some of the sweetest moments of the movie.

Hoult and Palmer are earnest actors with genuine chemistry. R’s inner pep talks while around Julie almost always consist of one phrase: “Don’t be creepy.” Unfortunately for him, that’s very hard to accomplish because he’s undead. Slack mouth, blood-stained lips, groaning and unmoving eyes all come with the territory. Warm Bodies could easily have become a standard zombie movie, but thankfully it doesn’t. It’s a pleasant mix of romance, post-Apocalypse action and comedy. It doesn’t shy away from gore and guns, but it doesn’t avoid being too optimistic, either.

R has a penchant for ’80s vinyl, but power ballads are just one facet of the near-perfect soundtrack. Warm Bodies includes an eclectic collection of indie pop (Feist, Bon Iver), ’80s rock (Guns N’ Roses, John Waite) and classic standbys like Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison. The music underscores moments so purposefully that it could be criticized as “too literal”—Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” for example—but it’s campy fun, like listening to the songs you’re embarrassed to let people know are on your iPod.

Yes, Warm Bodies is cheesy, but it’s good cheese. It’s not afraid to laugh at itself. It’s a movie about zombies who don’t just eat hearts, but have hearts, too. At times it pushes the suspension of disbelief a bit too far, but then again, it is a movie about undead romance.