In Maggie farmers burn their crops in a desperate bid to halt the spread of zombie plague. It seems writer John Scott 3 had a similar idea in mind when writing Maggie. How better to avoid the wretched overabundance of stale zombie movie tropes than by burning them all away? Maggie has burned away the horror movie. Maggie has burned away the zombie movie. And with all of that gone it turns out Maggie doesn’t have much left.

When Maggie (Abigail Breslin) gets infected with the necroambulist virus the hospital releases her to her father Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger), with the promise that he’ll return her to quarantine when she turns cannibal.

Maggie Movie Trailer

The question of why flesh hungry near-zombies with decaying body parts that slop infection everywhere are routinely allowed to violate quarantine can only be answered, “because that allows for the plot of Maggie.” Sure, horror movie fans have accepted dumber premises before, but Maggie doesn’t seem to fancy itself a horror movie. The strange quasi-apocalypse of Maggie is interesting — why should a zombie plague always spell complete and utter societal breakdown? — but too often feels like a fine-tuned universe mostly designed to keep Maggie away from anything that’s not family drama.

This Tweet Has a More Interesting Plot Than Maggie

Perhaps in some misguided pursuit of quiet pathos, Maggie pursues its quest to burn away anything resembling excitement right down to the dialogue and characterization level.

Everyone lacks specificity. Maggie is a bland teenage girl who comes from nowhere and dies a nobody. Her stepmother, Caroline (Joely Richardson), is a rote Christian scold, perfectly reflecting Maggie’s general lack of spiritual imagination. Arnold Schwarzenegger provides the best performance in Maggie, both because he’s genuinely good as a father all too aware of his powerlessness and because it’s Arnold and Arnold comes with the specificity of being Arnold.

Characters express their feelings in the barest emotional terms. You’ll hear “I love you,” “I missed you,” “we go back a long way,” and “you have to stop doing this to yourself,” in abundance. Maggie wants to investigate the drama of death and disease, but spends too much time not being a horror movie to say anything.

There’s a certain aesthetic to Maggie that’s been popping up more and more in recent years (the childhood flashbacks in Man of Steel are the most mainstream benchmarks). The colors are dull, the textures rustic, with an abundance of picturesque close-ups, frame-filling landscapes captured handheld, and a stunted depth of field. Directors deploying this style would love to be compared to Terrence Malick, but without his thematic weight it always turns out far more Levi’s commercial:

And while this look has become so common in indie films it typically doesn’t require comment, the aesthetics of Maggie infect the entire movie.

Though seemingly modern day, the characters in Maggie all dress and act like they’re in a Laura Ingalls Wilder zombie mash-up (please don’t, Grahame-Smith, haven’t you done enough?). The charitable interpretation is that the production design and costuming for Maggie was just way too enthralled by Kinfolk Magazine. Less charitable is my persistent feeling that director Henry Hobson is under the impression that the Midwest is actually just like that.

Despite the incredible effort taken by Maggie to purge everything enjoyable about zombie movies, it still manages to indulge all the genre’s worst impulses. We don’t get zombie politicizing (overbearing police tactics is very nearly a theme, but never quite lands any punches), but we do get long-winded NPR radio segments that helpfully cover only exactly what the viewer needs to know. Maggie doesn’t bother with horror, except when punching up dull scenes of Maggie staring dramatically into space with grating jump scare cutaways to snarling zombie faces.

Maggie doesn’t seem to understand that it’s possible to achieve drama through the mechanisms of horror (The Fly is proof enough). Still, Maggie’s quest to be a zombie drama stripped of any of the normal genre staples didn’t have to be a doomed one. It's just that Maggie burns everything away without bothering to find something meaningful to show us instead.

Maggie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and has a wide release date of May 8.