aka Infected: Darkest Day
UK. 2015.
Crew
Director/Visual Effects – Dan Rickard, Co-Director/Producer – Simon Drake, Music – Wilx. Production Company – BrightHelm Films.
Cast
Dan Rickard (Dan), Chris Wandell (Sam), Samantha Bolter (Kate), Adrienne Wandell (Adi), Christianne Van Wijk (Lisa), Christian Wise (Steven), Richard Wilkinson (James), Simon Drake (Will), Simon Bennett-Leyh (Satch), George French (Ben)
Plot
Dan wakes on a beach in Brighton with amnesia and no idea how he got there. He is aided by a girl who takes him to stay with a group of others all living together in a flat. Society outside has collapsed after people have caught an infection that turns them into maddened zombies. At the same time, soldiers are hunting them. Dan then makes the discovery that the soldiers have his photo and are searching for him in particular.
Darkest Day was the directorial debut of Dan Rickard who elsewhere has worked in visual effects, most notedly on The Martian (2015). Rickard also plays the lead role of the film’s amnesiac protagonist (who is also named Dan), as well as performs visual effects duties. The film was originally released in 2015 as Darkest Day but was re-released as Infected: Darkest Day in June 2021 to exploit the topicality of the Corona Virus pandemic.
Darkest Day is essentially a low-budget version of 28 Days Later (2002). Instead of Cillian Murphy waking in a hospital room, Dan Rickard’s character wakes on a beach with amnesia. As with 28 Days Later, he finds civilisation has collapsed and is overrun with infected zombies while he has been unconscious. He similarly proceeds to fall into the company of a group of others as they all attempt to obtain supplies and eke out survival.
Rickard delivers some decent photography, even if more of the film seems to be shot with more shakycam action than one’s patience with sitting through the process. Rickards is an okay lead – you are surprised by how young he looks, barely seeming to have hit the age of twenty – but his character is a cipher. It is not until the very end that we get any (hurried) explanation for why he is being pursued by military and has amnesia.
The film is clearly shot on a low-budget and one gets the impression that Dan Rickard filmed where he lived at the time and convinced a group of either flatmates or fellow film school students to be his actors. Much of the middle of the film feels like a regular student drama with people sitting around the flat not doing much and just griping at each other.
Dan Rickard does what he does well and provides some excellent effects – of ruined vehicles and the township in the background, of military helicopters flying through the sky. These are unobtrusive and very well integrated into the rest of the footage such that it takes you awhile to realise that what you are watching cannot be something that the film has staged on the low budget it has.
However, the film shows its amateurism in other ways. The sound recording is frequently poor such that in the dialogue exchanges I was having to turn the volume way up in order to hear what was being said. The other one is of dramatic inertia. Once Rickard’s character joins the group at the flat, the film consists of a long section where they sit around not doing much before things perk up with the arrival of the soldiers. Even then explanations for what is going on are kept until right at the end, leaving a film where you spend the bulk of the running time puzzling over what is going on.
Trailer here
Full film available here