This Is Not a Test (2025)
The zombie film has always been something of a canvas for social commentary, from George Romero's consumerist malls to the viral-panic anxieties that coursed through the early 2000s wave of fast-infected pictures. By 2025, the genre has been thoroughly charted: audiences know the beats, the archetypes, and the standard trajectory from outbreak to siege to moral collapse. Fitting a new film into that established shape requires either a genuinely fresh angle or exceptional execution of the familiar, and for low-to-mid budget productions in particular, the bar is a demanding one. This Is Not a Test plants itself squarely in the high-school horror corner of that tradition, trading suburban malls and shopping centres for the corridors of Cortege High, where a group of teenagers must hold out against a world gone to pieces outside the windows. It is a premise with obvious practical appeal for indie filmmakers (a single location, a small cast, contained action) but one that places enormous pressure on character and pacing to carry the weight when the budget for carnage inevitably runs thin. If you want a sense of how that balance plays out at a grander scale, our coverage of the Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and earlier entries like Resident Evil: Extinction shows just how differently the infected-world formula can be deployed when the resources and ambitions diverge sharply from one another.
Behind the camera is Adam MacDonald, a Canadian filmmaker who built a quiet reputation with his 2014 wilderness survival picture Backcountry, a tight, uncomfortable film about a bear attack that earned him genuine critical respect for his ability to generate dread on a limited canvas. He has since worked across both feature and television horror, and his genre instincts are not in doubt. This Is Not a Test is a co-production drawing together Anova Pictures, BondIt Media Capital, North Avenue Pictures, and WorldOne Entertainment, the kind of multi-partner indie arrangement that typically signals a production working carefully within modest means. The film was shot primarily in Canada, and runs at a brisk 102 minutes. There is no notable source material here: this is an original screenplay, which gives it freedom but also leaves it without the ready-made structural scaffolding that adaptation provides.
The cast is led by Olivia Holt, probably best known to younger audiences from her Disney Channel years and the television series Cloak and Dagger, where she demonstrated she could handle genre material with a decent amount of conviction. Here she plays Sloane, the central figure through whose shifting perspective the story is organised. Alongside her are Froy Gutierrez (Teen Wolf: The Movie), Carson MacCormac, Corteon Moore, and Chloe Avakian, a polished but relatively untested ensemble whose collective energy is clearly aimed at the young-adult horror demographic. Ensemble casts in single-location siege films live or die by the chemistry between players and the quality of the material they are given to work with. It is a format that has produced some genuinely memorable genre films, including the kind of sharply written peer-group dynamics you might recognise from something like Booksmart, though obviously filtered here through a much darker and more violent lens.
This Is Not a Test (2025), directed by Adam MacDonald, is a low-budget indie zombie film that knows exactly what it wants to do, and almost pulls it off. The opening is immediately frantic: running zombies, chaos, and genuine visceral tension that feels refreshingly raw. The creatures themselves are effectively designed, moving with unsettling speed and aggression that harkens back to the best of the genre's modern iterations. For a film made on a shoestring, the early commitment to practical effects and claustrophobic staging is admirable.
But that promising start quickly gives way to a frustrating lull. After the initial outbreak sequence, the film settles into a familiar "let's hide in the school" holding pattern, and then… not much happens. The zombies, so terrifying in the intro, become disappointingly sparse, appearing only in brief bursts between long stretches of dialogue-heavy tension that never quite builds to payoff. This is a common pitfall of independent zombie horror: ambitious ideas constrained by budget, resulting in a film that teases more than it delivers. For viewers expecting relentless undead action, the wait between set pieces can feel interminable.
Zombie fans like me will recognise echoes of superior entries: the frantic energy of Netflix's Black Summer, the tight survival dynamics of Korean zombie films like #Alive or Train to Busan. Those titles execute the same premise with tighter pacing, richer character work, and more consistent threat. This Is Not a Test doesn't fail outright (it has moments of genuine dread and a committed cast) but it never rises above "ok" for zombie enthusiasts, and for general audiences, it's likely to feel slow, underwhelming, and forgettable.
This Is Not a Test is a passable indie zombie flick that starts strong but struggles to sustain momentum. If you're a genre completist or appreciate low-budget grit, you might find enough to enjoy. But if you're looking for the visceral thrills or narrative cohesion of the genre's best? You'll probably leave feeling like you've seen this done better (and more often) elsewhere.
This Is Not a Test arrives at a curious moment for the genre: streaming has made zombie fiction extraordinarily accessible, which means any theatrical or VOD release is competing not just with other films but with entire seasons of tightly produced television built around the same ideas. MacDonald is clearly a filmmaker with real instincts for physical threat and spatial tension, and those qualities are not invisible here. But a strong opening reel and a committed young cast can only carry a picture so far when the middle stretches and the ending fail to deliver on the promise of the setup. For genre completists, there is probably just about enough here to make the hundred-odd minutes worthwhile. For everyone else, it sits in that slightly melancholy bracket of films that hint at what they could have been. School, as the tagline promises, is indeed out. Whether you leave feeling like you learned anything is another matter entirely.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-05-24
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for This Is Not a Test (2025) on YouTube
Where to watch (UK)
Stream: Shudder · Shudder Amazon Channel
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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