Writer/director Adam McDonald is back with a new zombie film, This Is Not A Test (2025).
After a period of dormancy in the 90s, the zombie film came running back to life in the 2000s following the success of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The trajectory from that iconic UK film to Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead through Darabont’s The Walking Dead and onwards is well documented, but the aughts were truly the golden renaissance of undead horror.
Had Adam McDonald’s This Is Not A Test come out during this period, it would have fit right in among the smaller film entries. As a 2025 film, however, it feels curiously out of step with the times, and not simply because the narrative is set in 1998.
Like 2004’s Dawn, the action kicks off immediately. Following an introduction to protagonist Sloane (Olivia Holt) contemplating suicide, the home she shares with her abusive father (Jeff Roop) is broken into by a ravenous zombie, her father is bitten, and Sloane flees into the suburban streets.
Initially it seems as though the action will unfold in a non-linear fashion. Following aerial credits over a city on fire, the story picks up with Sloane, accompanied by a ragtag group of teens, barricading the doors of their school. McDonald’s screenplay, an adaptation of Courtney Summers‘ 2012 YA novel, then jumps back 24 hours to show how Sloane connected with the survivors and wound up here.
Alas this is the last time that McDonald will employ this device; in fact, aside from a snowfall that infers a shift in seasons, the rest of the film is devoid of any time markers. On one hand, this enhances the sense of being unmoored as the days bleed endlessly into each other; on the other hand, it results in surprisingly sluggish pacing and robs the film of rising tension because it’s not clear how long the group has been on their own.
Despite the fact that the movie is principally set in one location with a core group of characters, none of the others feel fleshed out. There’s a brother and sister pair, Trace (Clown in a Cornfield’s Carson McCormac) and Grace (Locke & Key’s Chloe Avakian), controlling Cary (FROM’s Corteon Moore), and sensitive Rhys (The Strangers: Chapter 1’s Froy Gutierrez), but they’re all thinly drawn and difficult to distinguish.
That leaves the heavy lifting on Holt’s shoulders, but even Sloane is a nothing character. Withdrawn and hurting from trauma and depression, the teen girl wanders around mute for large sections of the film, passively observing the others and dreaming of her absent older sister Lily (Level 16‘s Joelle Farrow). In a post-screening Q&A, McDonald explained the film is about Sloane’s journey from near suicide to discovering that she wants to live, but the film fails to convincingly execute that arc. Over the course of the film, Sloane is forced into several life-threatening situations where she must act, but the character never truly comes alive.
Despite this, there is an urgency in the attack sequences, as well as the use of aerials to visually contrast the quiet ennui of the suburbs with the bloody aftermath of a zombie apocalypse.
The film is at its best in a tense sequence involving English teacher, Mr. Baxter (Luke MacFarlane), an enigmatic figure who has snuck into the school unbeknownst to them. Not only are the teens suspicious of his motivations, but there’s uncertainty if he’s been bitten. Unlike so many other zombie titles, the undead in This Is Not A Test aren’t a metaphor, so Mr. Baxter’s function in the narrative is to encourage the group to tackle some (welcome) thorny philosophical questions about their responsibility to help other humans that was previously absent.
Strangely the inability to trust adults and/or controlling figures never ties into Sloane’s abuse by her father or even Cary’s forceful attempts to lead the group (which may or may not have contributed to a death earlier in the film). Instead McDonald is content to keep all of these narrative threads isolated and independent of each other, which is disappointing because it feels like a missed opportunity, particularly considering that teens’ distrust of adults is a hallmark of YA media.
All in all, This Is Not A Test is a little too derivative and familiar. This would be right at home during the glut of zombie titles in the aughts which told straightforward undead stories, but as a contemporary text, there’s nothing fresh about this. The characters are underdeveloped, the conflict is muted and uninteresting, and even the late-90s time period, which is a specific adaptation change from the book, is arbitrary aside from a few specifically Canadian needledrops .
This Is Not A Test has a great cast and capable direction, but this is just standard zombie fare. 2/5
This Is Not A Test had its American debut at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival and played at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival
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