One Cut of the Dead (2017)
½ — One Cut of the Dead (2017)
Everyone told me to stick with it. "It takes a while, but trust the process." "The first act is meant to be rough." "Just wait for the twist." Well, I waited. I sat through thirty-seven minutes of shaky camerawork, wooden performances and chaotic non-direction, telling myself this had to be going somewhere worth the effort. And then the twist arrived. And I felt cheated.
Here is the thing about One Cut of the Dead that its admirers seem perfectly happy to wave away: the premise you are sold is a lie. A film crew shooting a zombie horror gets attacked by actual zombies during a live shoot. That is the hook. That is what gets people through the door. Except it never happens. None of it is real within the story. What you have actually been watching is a terrible low-budget zombie film, and the rest of the movie pulls back to show you how that terrible film got made. The "real" action was fake all along. Meta! Genius! Or, if you are me: a bait-and-switch dressed up as a bold artistic statement.
I can see what the film is reaching for. The idea of celebrating the chaos, compromise and sheer stubborn love that goes into low-budget filmmaking has genuine warmth behind it. And I will grant that structurally, the thing is ambitious. But ambition without execution is just noise. The problem is that the opening thirty-seven minutes, which you are supposed to reappraise with fresh eyes once the curtain is pulled back, remains genuinely painful to sit through no matter how much context you retroactively apply. Clumsy is clumsy. Flat is flat. Knowing it was supposed to be bad does not make it more enjoyable. It just makes it intentionally bad, which is its own category of tedium.
The second half, the behind-the-scenes portion that the film's defenders tend to point to as the real achievement, offers improv comedy, slapstick bickering and a kind of forced quirkiness that keeps nudging you in the ribs, desperate for you to find it charming. I didn't. The writing is thin, the performances remain wooden even when they are presumably supposed to be, and the laughs, such as they are, feel laboured. The whole enterprise reminded me of someone explaining a joke at length after it didn't land the first time.
What frustrates me most is not that the film is bad. Plenty of films are bad. What frustrates me is the critical armour it has been fitted with, the idea that scepticism proves you missed the point, that finding it tedious means you weren't smart or patient enough. It's a neat trick. Build a defence mechanism into the concept so that anyone who doesn't love it can be dismissed as having failed to engage properly. I engaged. I engaged for the full running time. I came away thinking it was one of the most overrated things I have seen in years.
For a single-take gimmick done with genuine purpose and momentum, Hardcore Henry is a far more committed and entertaining experiment in formal rule-breaking. That film commits to its conceit without asking you to admire it for being deliberately rubbish for the first half hour.
One Cut of the Dead is not experimental courage. It is amateurish filmmaking wrapped in a retroactive justification. Call it a love of cinema if you like. I call it a trick that doesn't hold up, a structure built on a misleading foundation, and very nearly the longest I have ever felt ninety-odd minutes to be. Half a star, and I am being generous.
Rating: ½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-09-27
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Shudder · Shudder Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Philo · AMC Plus Apple TV channel · AMC+ Amazon Channel · AMC+ Roku Premium Channel
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Physical: Amazon US
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