I went to watch Zombeid without high expectations. After all, Pakistan isn’t always known for its brilliant cinema, and most films released on Eid are designed to be vapid crowd pleasers meant to rake in the big bucks. This is probably why I didn’t have the worst time watching it.
The acting was fine, the plot was fine, the visuals were fine. Everything was just fine.
As a zombie media aficionado, I’ve seen just about every zombie TV show and movie there is to watch on Netflix and beyond. I love the genre. There’s something about how a zombie apocalypse changes human nature that I love examining. But there was none of that here.
The zombie lore was quite basic — the virus spreads through an extremely predictable mechanism. The zombies are sensitive to sound, but not the smell of human flesh. There is, of course, a final zombie boss who is extremely pumped up on steroids and revenge and lacks the singular flesh-eating motivation the other zombies have… inadvertently raising questions about how that came to be.
I guess that’s one of the most obvious plot holes here for me — and let me tell you, I’m not great at identifying plot holes, I usually like to turn my brain off and watch movies. I enjoy being entertained. Was I entertained? Mildly. Would I watch it again? Nah.
Anyway, now that you have some context, let me talk about the film a bit more. It’s directed by Nabeel Qureshi and Fizza Ali Meerza. They’ve both teamed up with Fahad Mustafa and Mehwish Hayat on at least four other films. The first of these films was Na Maloom Afraad (2014), which I also saw in the cinema, though Hayat only had a cameo appearance in a highly controversial item number. They both starred as leads in their next film together, Actor In Law . What both of these films got really right was the way you could tell they were shot in Karachi because the city was a main character.
Unfortunately, despite Zombeid being advertised as Pakistan’s first zombie thriller, there’s very little in terms of visuals that suggests the film was shot in a recognisable Pakistani city. That was probably the biggest let down for me. After watching a clever promo on Geo News (the film was produced by GeoFilms) where these two anchors go through a rundown of the daily headlines while zombies ravage the office behind them, I was really pumped to witness a zombie apocalypse within a local context.
Instead, most of the movie is centred around an unrecognisable, ugly, concrete block of a gym called Muscle Factory allegedly located in Karachi’s DHA Phase 8 but which may as well be floating in the ether for all we know. Hayat is Zara, a Zumba instructor at the gym, and Mustafa is Wali, a former Mr Pakistan winner whose bodybuilding career was cut short by injury. He asks for a job at the gym and is given a chance to get back into the fitness industry after some time away.
The bane of his existence is Marwan, his former bodybuilding partner, trained by the same (now-dead) ustaad . Marwan was disqualified from the Mr Pakistan competition because his drug test showed he’d been taking steroids. Since then, the man appears to have made it his mission to peddle steroids indiscriminately to insecure looksmaxxers at the gym. Interestingly, it was here that I began wondering… is Zombeid deeper than I’m giving it credit for?
Is it perhaps a commentary on the culture of commodifying and modifying our bodies, making them appear sculpted and perfect for the gazes of others looking at us through their phones? Is it suggesting that the ground zero of this culture are the gyms and bodybuilding competitions of the world? Could it be proposing that such a culture spreads like a virus through proximity to others who are infected with it? Are we all becoming mindless zombies, obsessed with looking a certain way, performing for others’ gazes a certain way?
I didn’t allow my thoughts to go any deeper than this because I thought I may be handing the filmmakers too much credit. There isn’t much else that pointed to any deep-seated motivations behind making this film.
Anyway, as you may have guessed by now, the virus is spread through a trial steroid that Marwan starts injecting desperate looksmaxxers with. What happens next is that the gym becomes infested with zombies. Of course, our leads all remain bite-free for most of the film. There are the usual shenanigans – sneaking around to find a way out of the gym, almost getting bitten, an influencer ludicrously going live to alert citizens about the situation in the gym, a police nafri that shows up hoping to bust a rave they can extort money and ‘confiscate’ drugs and booze from, and finally a throng of people gathering outside the gym, watching expectantly in exactly the way Karachiites hop over to Seaview the minute there’s a storm brewing. (There was a joke about this in the movie too, by the way.)
I won’t tell you how it ends, but I will say I enjoyed the little jokes and allusions to Karachi and Pakistani culture in the movie. The jokes were very current and cleverly written — for instance, there was one about “Strait of Hormones”. Ironically, there are scenes during Wali and Zara’s courtship where they watch a zombie movie in the cinema and then another where they get frisky while playing a zombie shooter game. The chemistry between the leads was good — after all the projects they’ve done together, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.
I enjoyed the character of Zara just a little bit more than Wali. Mustafa tends to play the same kind of guy again and again — a sensitive softboi underdog with something to prove. I’m not saying he’s not good at it, but it would be cool to see him in a different role at some point. The visuals of him buffed up as a bodybuilder were hard to stomach though — they definitely looked like his head had been superimposed onto an AI-generated body. I’m not sure how much AI was used in the making of this film, but I’m not a fan of the use of AI in creative disciplines. Why don’t we just save it for things that human beings DON’T want to do?
Overall, I’d give the film a solid 6.5/10. Go watch it with your friends and family and enjoy the jokes. It’s no worse than spending the evening Netflix and chilling at home — and hopefully you’ll get to collectively bond over the experience. Isn’t that what cinema is about, after all?
