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Aug 28, 2015 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

In the aftermath of a nuclear war, Ann Burden lives a bucolic, lonesome life in her hometown, tucked into an Appalachian valley untouched by the radiation. The arrival of two other survivors—a government engineer named John and a local miner named Caleb—ends her solitude and complicates her efforts to survive.

Based on a 1974 YA novel of the same name, Z for Zachariah is decidedly not a film for teens. Although its plucky heroine, triangular romance and rural American setting will be familiar to fans of Twilight and The Hunger Games, director Craig Zobel is less interested in sex or thrills than he is in what people value when their past and future have ceased to exist. The apocalypse of Z for Zachariah is a vague one and mostly exists to turn Ann’s hometown into an Edenic prison for the characters, a place where they can live comfortably, if simply, but with little hope of any greater purpose or goal. Zobel makes this conflict (slightly too) literal via a subplot in which Ann and John argue whether or not they should tear down a chapel her father built in order to build a water wheel to power their generators. The final act leaves one unsure if the film understands its own implications with regards to these themes, but it doesn’t take the easy way out.

Zobel does an admirable job of creating a comforting, pastoral environment via homey art direction, soft lighting and swelling orchestral music, but it falls to the three actors to sell the low-boil tension and despair that suffuse the film. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine are well cast as the guarded man of science and the folksy good ol’ boy, respectively. Pine leans into the mysterious rake stereotype that is Caleb whereas Ejiofor makes John a more rounded character, competent and intelligent while also self-conscious and paranoid. The films great revelation is Margot Robbie, likely known best by audiences as the glamorous femme fatale in The Wolf of Wall Street. Draped in flannel shirts and oversized jeans, Robbie infuses Ann with a childlike, girl-next-door naiveté that plays nicely off Ejiofor’s weary restlessness and Pine’s unsettling charm. Robbie keeps her honest and natural as she navigates both an apocalypse and the affections of her companions and in turn keeps the film grounded, even when it doesn’t seem to know where it’s going.

Author rating: 6.5/10