First Zone (2026)

The end of the world has rarely looked as waterlogged as it does in First Zone. Thom Lunshof's debut feature, which has its world premiere In Competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, imagines a Netherlands all but swallowed by the sea, a drowned country of endless grey water and half-submerged ruins. Shot on real locations across Holland and playing for the festival's Sean Connery Prize, it is a Dutch post-apocalyptic drama that wears its ambition openly, and there is plenty here to admire even when the film as a whole does not quite come together.

We open on Fenna, played by Hadewych Minis, living alone in an abandoned wind turbine that rises out of an ocean seeming to stretch on forever. She has survived a climate catastrophe by becoming hard and self-sufficient, until a violent storm tears her from the only home she has left and sets her adrift. From there the film becomes an odyssey: Fenna crossing the vast, flooded wetlands by boat, meeting other survivors and then moving on from them, one after another, as she makes her way across the zones.

If that setup puts you in mind of Waterworld, you are not far off, because almost the entire film plays out on the water. And it is beautifully done. Sami el Hassani's photography finds a genuine, desolate beauty in all that grey Dutch sky and endless flood, and the whole thing looks and sounds a cut above what a debut on this scale usually manages. The soundtrack in particular is excellent, all mournful acoustic guitar licks that reminded me, in the best possible way, of the score to The Last of Us. On a purely sensory level, First Zone is a lovely thing to sit inside.

The performances hold up too. The survivors Fenna meets are decent and varied, each sketched with enough character to register before she drifts on, and Minis herself is quietly excellent in the lead. You can feel a buried pain in her from the very first frame, a grief the film never spells out, and she carries it with a weathered toughness that put me in mind of Frances McDormand. She is very good indeed.

Here is my problem, though. For all its atmosphere, First Zone feels like it is missing its middle. We never learn what caused the flood, or what the different zones actually are, or how you travel between them, or why the world beyond Fenna's turbine is so dangerous. None of it is explained. The film is essentially eighty-odd minutes of one woman travelling on boats, meeting people, losing them and moving on, with a handful of brief exchanges along the way and not a great deal underneath. And then it simply stops, abruptly, as though someone had cut the reel early. I came away feeling I had watched the atmosphere of a film without the film itself, a mood in search of a story.

It is a hard one to score, because so much of the craft is genuinely accomplished. But a beautiful surface and a compelling lead can only carry you so far when the world beneath them is left this blank. First Zone has the look, the sound and the central performance of something special, and nowhere near enough of the substance. It feels, honestly, like one of those obscure films you stumble across late at night on Netflix and half-admire without ever quite engaging with.

Three stars. A visually and sonically accomplished debut with a real presence at its centre, held back by a story that never fills in the enormous, intriguing world it builds. I would happily watch whatever Thom Lunshof makes next, and I only hope the screenplay next time is as fully realised as the filmmaking around it.

Reviewed from a screener provided ahead of the film's world premiere in the In Competition strand at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where First Zone screens from 16 August 2026.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from Country Netherlands: Father and Daughter (2000), Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), The Vanishing (1988)

More from the 2020s: Look Back (2024), The Whale (2022), All That's Left of You (2025)

More drama: Home (2026), Hijra (2025), Ghost School (2025)