Parvulos is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.
I’m going to give Parvulos the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its politics, in that I’m assuming it isn’t trying to have a politics at all. I begin by saying that, because the premise of the film is that a raging, deadly virus out-paced the rollout of vaccine boosters, so the government put out an untested vaccine whose unintended side effect was zombie-ism. The film first poses the question: What if society crumbled because of a deadly virus. Then, as an end-of-first-act twist, it posits instead: What if society crumbled because of that virus’s vaccine?
This first act is a slow-developing world building section in which three brothers, living alone in a home in the country, struggle to survive by hunting and gathering. The two eldest (Farid Escalante Correa and Leonardo Cervantes) work tirelessly to maintain a sense of a normal life, while the youngest (Mateo Ortega Casillas) remains somewhat naïve to all of the realities of that life. This includes what is being kept hidden in their basement…
What follows from the first act is a grotesque slapstick comedy section involving the three children trying to tame their zombified parents. As with most things they do in the film, there does not seem to be much rhyme or reason to their decision to start doing this at this point. Prior to telling the youngest about the pair of zombies, the kids were deathly afraid of even approaching the bars of the cage that housed the zombies. Deciding to then put them on leashes and parade them around like dogs as a comic beat slaps in the face of that previous threat.
But this is how most of the film operates. It is difficult to understand the stakes of these children’s bid for survival. They want enough for food that they eat soup made from a pet frog, but this is after they successfully hunt for dog meat in the woods (yes, the protagonists of the film kill dogs for food in this movie, so CW for those sensitive to that). They also have a chest full of rats that they could theoretically eat. They lose a backpack of supplies, but it’s unclear what they were doing in the first place that led to the backpack slipping away into the river. For much of the first half, plot beats land without the weight they are meant to.
Parvulos eventually settles into a more serious drama about survival and, I guess, the nature of human compassion. It wallows in a melodramatic post-apocalyptica that somehow still perseveres in a post-Walking Dead zombie genre. Ultimately, the film raises no new questions about what it means to be human or to lose one’s humanity in a zombie apocalypse; it simply regurgitates the same familiar song whose refrain begs us to consider who is more human, the living or the undead. It’s kind of a fruitless exercise, in my opinion.
For what it’s worth, the film’s washed out gray aesthetic works well for this more dramatic final tone. And the three young actors — who are asked to carry the film from start to finish — provide fairly strong, emotional performances.
Parvulos: C
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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