The Battery (2012)

Here's the thing about The Battery: for the first hour, almost nothing happens. Not "slow burn, building dread" nothing. Just... nothing. And I'm a huge zombie film fan, so I went in giving it every benefit of the doubt I could muster. It didn't help.

What makes it all the more frustrating is that the production story behind this film is genuinely remarkable. The whole thing was made on a budget of around six thousand dollars. To put that in perspective, George Romero made Night of the Living Dead in 1968 for roughly ten thousand. That alone deserves a round of applause, and I mean that sincerely. Getting any feature film off the ground is hard enough. Getting a zombie film off the ground on pocket change, and actually finishing it, is a real achievement. Full credit to the director, writer and lead for pulling that off.

But credit for making it and credit for it being good are two very different things, and I've got to be honest here.

The central problem is Mickey. He's one of the two leads, and as a character he makes almost no sense in the context of a zombie apocalypse. He wanders around without a weapon, refuses to deal with the undead when the situation clearly demands it, and spends most of his time with headphones on, seemingly oblivious to everything. Now, you could argue that's a deliberate character choice, a man refusing to accept the new reality around him. Fine. I'd buy that if the film did the work to make it convincing. It doesn't. Mickey just comes across as baffling rather than compelling, and unfortunately the actor playing him isn't strong enough to paper over those cracks. It's a hard watch when a character is both written poorly and performed poorly at the same time.

The low budget does hurt the pacing in a way that's difficult to overlook. Long stretches of the first hour are simply skippable. I don't say that lightly. There are brief flashes of something interesting, moments where you think it might be finding its feet, but they're too few and too far between to carry sixty minutes of film. When something genuinely compelling finally does arrive around the hour mark, I actually sat up. Right, I thought, here we go. And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, there's a scene that consists almost entirely of watching someone smoke a cigarette in a car. For several minutes. After which the story goes exactly where you'd expect it to go.

And then it ends. Abruptly, without resolution or clarity. The kind of ending that feels less like an artistic choice and more like the film simply ran out of road. I've seen plenty of ambiguous endings that work beautifully. I think The Witch (2015) pulls that off with real conviction, leaving you unsettled in all the right ways. The Battery's ending doesn't feel ambiguous so much as unfinished.

If you're a devoted fan of zombie cinema and you want to see what can be squeezed out of virtually no resources, there's some value in watching it from that angle alone. It does prove that imagination and determination can get you further than money. But as an actual film experience, as a story that grips you and earns your time, it falls well below average. Two stars, and I'm generous with one of them because of what they managed to pull off financially. The ambition is real. The film, less so.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2012  | Watched: 2025-04-20

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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