It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Filmed in North Macedonia by co-writer/director Vardan Tozija, Beyond the Wasteland (or M), is the story of a young boy named Marko (Matej Sivakov) living in the forest with his dangerously paranoid father (Sasko Kocev) during a zombie apocalypse. Between bouts of drinking and borderline abuse, Father is trying to teach Marko how to survive in the new world – the only world Marko knows. But isolation and loneliness takes its tole and our story picks up as Marko becomes friends with Miko (Aleksandar Nichovski), a young boy with Downs Syndrome, and his mother.
Beyond the Wasteland (renamed for American audiences to avoid confusion with the classic Fritz Lang film, M) doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. When everything goes sideways, as it always does, Marko and Miko are left alone to try to find some sort of hope in a hopeless world. On the plus side, the Macedonian landscapes are breathtaking and even the desolation of the cityscapes they come upon have their own kind of fantastical beauty.
If you’re looking for gore or intense zombie action, you’ll be disappointed. This is the sort of film that doesn’t have the budget for that sort of thing. Instead, we get your standard “humans are the real monsters” kind of approach (complete with a weird holographic fascistic anti-immigrant rant toward the end), and when we do get some zombie action, it’s more along the lines of the brilliant The Battery, but without the intense psychological turmoil. The boys are only trapped in the back of a truck for a few minutes before Father rescues them and seals his own fate.
While Beyond the Wasteland isn’t a groundbreaking reinvigoration of the zombie genre, it’s a solid film with great performances. There is tragedy, desperation, and hope, along with an almost magical realism element to the narrative, as Marko envisions himself as the Leaf Child from his beloved storybook, in search of his fairy mother who will make everything better once they are reunited. This allows for brief animated moments that elevate the film from your standard zombie fare.
The convenience of Marko’s mysterious M vaccination scar, which saves his life in the end, requires a suspension of disbelief that almost breaks the final moments of the film, but you know what? Fuck that. What’s wrong with having hope? Not every zombie film has to be some nihilistic negation of life, love, and hope. Sometimes it’s okay to have a happy ending (even if it might mean Marko spends the rest of his life in a hospital, having his blood drained as quickly and often as possible in order to create enough antivirus to save the world).