Fantastic Fest 2024 – In 2024, it’s not exactly easy to make anything with zombies all that interesting. Decades after George A. Romero pioneered the modern zombie with Night of the Living Dead, we’ve had oceans of TV shows, movies, comics, and games about the undead. Yet, Mexican writer/director Isaac Ezban‘s Parvulos does manage to make entertaining an otherwise exhausted horror subgenre.

Ezban’s film focuses on three brothers, Benjamin (Mateo Ortega Casillas), Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes), and Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa). Of the three, Salvador is the oldest and most hardened, forced to take care of his younger siblings. This involves eating any animal they encounter, including a dog (sorry, pet lovers), frogs, and basically whatever else they can kill. It’s a bleak world indeed, after a pandemic wiped out most of the population and also sparked a zombie outbreak. COVID definitely seems like a likely source of inspiration here, as well as vaccine disinformation.

What separates Parvulos from say, The Walking Dead, its spinoffs, and other recent zombie media, is the focus on these brothers. How many zombie narratives center on child survivors? It’s a unique twist that raises the stakes. The three actors give solid performances, too, and you certainly don’t want anything horrible to happen to them. It’s easy to feel for Salvador, who, instead of living a normal teenage life, wakes up every day, works out, and does whatever he has to do to protect his brothers. This also includes keeping the youngest, Benjamin, away from what’s locked up in the basement. The secret is pretty obvious, even within the first act, but for the sake of avoiding spoilers, it won’t be revealed here.

Ezban gives his film a totally bleak and gray look. The film is mostly void of colors, except for an anime the brothers watch repeatedly and some of the dead bodies and zombie wounds. The grim atmosphere reinforces the post-apocalyptic landscape and the perilous situation that the brothers face. When color is used, such as a clip of the anime, it’s a brief flash of a world that once was, or color is used sparingly to underscore the ever-present dead bodies and reanimated corpses. The color stresses the looming threat.

The film’s main fault lies in its shifting tone. The first act or so plays out like a straight-up horror movie. A few jokes here and there highlight the relationship between the brothers, but they’re rare. However, once the basement secret surfaces, the movie becomes more like a horror-comedy. The sudden change feels inconsistent with earlier scenes. It’s a bit jarring, especially when the film tries to shift back to pure horror territory in the last act.

For as stale as zombie media has become, Parvulos manages to enliven a tired subgenre. In focusing on three brothers, it gives a fresh prospective to an otherwise familiar narrative. You’ll root for these siblings to survive.