Open Grave (2013)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) Good directors can manage to elevate any kind of dross, while bad directors can find a way to suck the life out of even the most promising material. I haven’t yet seen enough of Gonzalo López-Gallego’s work to say if Open Grave is a fluke, but it manages to mishandle what could have been an interesting take on the zombie genre in any other hands. It begins as a man (Sharlto Copley) wakes up amnesiac in a mass grave. Clawing his way out, he discovers a group of equally-amnesiac people, some of whom he suspects knowing. It quickly becomes clear that there’s a zombie apocalypse unfolding, and there’s too much medical equipment lying around to pretend that they’re average people. Sadly, that’s roughly Open Grave’s peak moment—everything after that is duller and duller, blander and blander, longer and longer. Your only reward for making it to the end of the film is how the sight of a gigantic open mass grave can actually become boring by simply going on, and on, and on until we’re actually clamouring for the end credits. The film is too mean-spirited to be effective, as it sinks so deeply into darkness that it becomes impossible to care about any of it. Still, I can see how amnesia could have its benefits, especially if it’s enough to make anyone forget about Open Grave.