Zombeid Review: Pakistan's First Zombie Film Is All Muscle and Mayhem

We have waited a long time for this. Not for a good Pakistani zombie film, necessarily - just for a Pakistani zombie film, full stop. The genre is the deep end of the pool, the place a young industry usually has no business swimming until it has learned to float, and for years the assumption was that we simply would not try. Well. Someone tried. And whatever else you want to say about Zombeid, you cannot say nobody cared.

The film is directed by Nabeel Qureshi and written and produced by Fizza Ali Meerza - the Na Maloom Afraad and Load Wedding partnership, a duo who have never once been accused of thinking small. This is them swinging for the fences with both hands, and the swing connects often enough to be worth the price of the ticket. It also misses in exactly the place you would fear it might: the bit with the words.

For all its astonishing craft, Zombeid benches an enormous amount of weight and still, somehow, skips the one day that matters - the one where a character earns an ounce of depth.

Here is the premise, and you have to admire the nerve of it. On chaand raat, in an upscale Karachi gym called the Muscle Factory, a prototype steroid does what prototype steroids in films always do - it turns the clientele into the ravenous undead. Trapped inside are Wali (Fahad Mustafa), a fallen former Mr Pakistan who is all heart and no edge, and Zara (Mehwish Hayat), a Zumba instructor with rather more sense than the men around her. Outside, a police cordon would quite happily flatten the building, and Eid with it, to keep the infection from reaching the city. Somewhere in between stands Marwan (Dodi Khan), the steroid-peddling rival whose shortcut started all this. The plot, if we are generous enough to call it that, is roughly two lines long - and Zombeid knows it, which is why it spends its energy elsewhere.

And the elsewhere is where the film earns its keep. The makeup and prosthetics are, no exaggeration, top-tier - work that would not embarrass a production with ten times the budget and a far older horror tradition behind it. The production design leans into a stylised, high-contrast comic-book look - think the muscular silhouettes of 300 by way of Sin City - and Rana Kamran's camera prowls the gym floor like it knows where the bodies are. The sound design deserves its own paragraph and will have to settle for a sentence: it is the thing that makes the bites land in your stomach rather than just your eyes. Best of all is the film's one genuinely inspired idea - that a gym is an armoury if you squint. Dumbbells, kettlebells, a barbell, a 10kg plate swung like a discus: Zombeid turns leg day into a massacre, and it is a hoot every single time.

The cast mostly keeps pace. Fahad Mustafa is doing the gentle-underdog turn he has done before - he could play it asleep - but the bodybuilder backstory hands him just enough new colour to keep it from going stale. Mehwish Hayat, reunited with him eight years after Load Wedding, is the more grounded presence, even if the script keeps tucking her behind the men at the worst moments. The real find is Dodi Khan, who plays Marwan's sleaze without ever reaching for the melodrama the role invites - he simply is the worst man in the room, and lets you despise him at your leisure. Mani, mercifully, knows exactly how broad to pitch the comedy, and his timing is the safety valve that keeps the horror from curdling. Babar Ali, less lucky, is handed a cop part you have seen a hundred times and asked to make it the hundred-and-first.

But - and with a film this ambitious there is always a but - the screenplay is the department that did not do its reps. Wali has zero darkness in him, which is a strange thing to say about a man watching his city eat itself; the supporting players are types rather than people; and the middle act sags as scenes overstay their welcome and a tighter edit goes begging. The dialogue, Mani aside, settles too often for the familiar. Shani Arshad's score does its job and then evaporates - this film badly wanted an original earworm and never got one. And then there is the Karachi of it all. This is a Nabeel Qureshi-Fizza Ali Meerza joint, the team who once made the grime and chaos of the city a character in its own right, and yet the Karachi here is curiously scrubbed - a few clean exteriors and a lot of soundstage, with the odd bodybuilder physique that has the unmistakable sheen of having been finished in a render farm rather than a gym. For a film about flesh, that is an irony it could have done without. There is also a plot hole around the final, super-powered zombie that the film simply hopes you will not poke. Reader, I poked.

None of which, I should be clear, is a reason to stay home. Zombeid is a landmark precisely because it tries the thing nobody here had tried, and clears the bar on craft so comprehensively that its failures of script feel like the next problem to solve rather than a verdict on the whole enterprise. See it on the biggest screen you can find, with the loudest, most raucous Eid crowd you can gather - this is a film that gets funnier and bloodier the more people are screaming around you. And when the sequel comes, as the box office guarantees it will, here is the only note that matters: spend the off-season writing the people, not the prosthetics. You have already proved you can build the body. Now give it a brain - the zombies, after all, are still looking for one.

Distributed by Geo Films and produced by Filmwala Pictures, Zombeid somehow opened as Eid family entertainment - which tells you everything about a censor board that waved through more dismembered limbs than a butcher on Bakra Eid, and not one of them out of place.

Cast and crew

What other critics made of it

I am not the only one who walked out of Zombeid arguing with it - and the spread of opinion is, frankly, half the fun. For three other takes on Pakistan's first zombie outing:

• Hufsa Chaudhry in Dawn's Images - the most measured of the lot, calling it "fine" across the board and a better night out in company than alone.
• Simon Ramshaw for ScreenAnarchy - the international read, won over by the practical effects and the sheer absurd commitment to the premise.
• Muhammad Suhayb in Youlin Magazine - the warmest of the three, ranking it among the most polished productions Pakistani cinema has managed in years.

Want to see what you are in for? The official trailer is on YouTube, and the full production and box-office record - including that chart-topping Eidul Azha haul - is catalogued on Wikipedia.

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Want to catch Zombeid this Eid? Check live showtimes on Derooj — every cinema in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, updated through the day. Pick your screen, pick your time, and bring a crowd. The zombies are better with company.