The movie begins with a bloody sneaker, and a young man breathing heavily, ever more heavily, as a bloodthirsty expression takes hold of his face. This is Senan, played terrifically by Sam Keeley. The quick visions of his former self come to him in flashbacks and nightmares. Now, after an injection and hospital stay, he’s normal again. There’s a circle of blood in the lower white of his eye that’s a mark of his former state. He and other cured are released into the general populace under the supervision of a none-too-pleased military man. Protestors distrust them. The cured, at least the most conscientious of them, don’t trust themselves. Because they can remember what they did. And what Senan did what especially terrible.
Still, Senan has a home: that of his sister-in-law Abbie (Ellen Page), an American journalist and the widow of Senan’s brother. Abbie and her little boy welcome Senan, but most of the cured are not so fortunate. There’s Conor, for instance, who seems frail and gentle upon release; he has a bond with Senan that articulates itself in great physical closeness. Conor was once a prominent lawyer, now he’s something like a sanitation worker, rejected by family. As Conor tries to draw Senan into an insurrectionist group, and also ingratiate himself into Abbie’s life, he becomes more and more forceful. The performance here by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is particularly vivid.
Meanwhile, in a medical facility cum prison, a group of what are called “the resistant,” virus victims for whom the cure doesn’t take, are about to be wiped out by the government. The developer of the cure races against time to synthesize a new version of the medicine, in part to save her own lover from death. Senan is enlisted as a medical assistant there. He’s useful because the currently infected never attack one of their own, and they still recognize the cured as that. This glitch leads to all sorts of interesting plot complications and loopholes. Freyne’s scheme also makes potent use of ideas developed in George A. Romero’s “Dead” series, particularly those about undead intelligence evolution put forward in “Day of the Dead.”
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