Some generic horror movies leave one wondering, amidst all the numbing blood-letting and by-the-numbers backstories: what made the filmmaker want to make this movie? The teenagers vs. zombies drama “This Is Not a Test” has a scene that provides a clear answer, even if you haven’t read Courtney Summers’s source novel.
In writer/director Adam MacDonald’s movie adaptation, a group of high-school-aged survivors takes a break from an ongoing zombie outbreak with a game of Never Have I Ever. The players dutifully take a drink whenever they have previously experienced one of the suggested prompts. It’s a tidy, but lifeless exercise in post-“The Breakfast Club” style adolescent solidarity, so of course it ends with the characters all sitting quietly once the prompt becomes, “Never have I ever been in love.”
Like John Hughes’s teen dramedy, “This Is Not a Test” focuses on young adults as they continue growing up, only now with zombies holding them back instead of Saturday detention. In this case, the backdrop of an apocalyptic crisis mainly serves as an overtaxed kickstarter whenever this flat ensemble drama stops running on fumes. There’s still more sudsy “The Walking Dead”-style dialogue scenes than you might like, though not because watching shell-shocked stock types process their feelings is necessarily a bad thing. Rather, the way that these characters talk, as well as how their pre-zombie lives are evoked, never really makes so much conversation seem warranted.
“This is Not a Test” mostly follows Sloane (Olivia Holt), a young woman defined by her relationships with her immediate family, specifically her abusive father (Jeff Roop) and supportive sister, Lilly (Joelle Farrow). Sloane keeps hoping for a text message or phone call from Lilly, but it’s 1998, and the phone lines are down, so sheltering in place seems like the best bet for Sloane and her group. Tensions inevitably flare, as in a canned sub-plot involving creepy high school teacher Mr. Baxter (Luke Macfarlane).
It’s still hard to appreciate the ostensible difference in character between Baxter, who’s accused of staring a little too hard at his younger companions, and Rhys (Froy Gutierrez), Sloane’s well-intentioned but painfully awkward love interest. Rhys’s emblematically sketchy ice-breaker with Sloane—“No, I know you: you’re Sloane Price,” followed by more off-the-cuff reminiscences from her apparently longtime, but formerly silent admirer—says more about Macdonald’s tone-deaf understanding of teenage angst than it does about Rhys.
This is especially frustrating since Rhys provides Sloane and a few other characters with opportunities to either work through their issues or face unresolved issues that predate their current circumstances. Now there are no loved ones to help Sloane and the gang process what they’re feeling. Now it’s up to whoever’s left to help each other live long enough to unpack their baggage.
Too bad Rhys doesn’t have much of a personality beyond a short callback to a rote family tragedy, which Sloane discovers and discloses as if it were a big secret. It shouldn’t be, though it does give Rhys a chance to declaim a while, and also maybe distinguish himself from fellow teen survivors like the former jock Cary (Corteon Moore) or the emotionally brittle Trace (Carson MacCormac).
Meanwhile, Sloane’s trauma drama seems the most sympathetic and the most brief; in an early scene, Lilly tells her sister that she’ll protect them both from dad, but they must also take things “One day at a time.” It’s a good mantra, and one might’ve been strong enough to support Sloane, an otherwise wispy character who clearly doesn’t know what to do with so much hurt and resentment.
Unfortunately, tin-eared monologues do most of the dramatic heavy lifting, since much of the movie was shot with natural lighting, meaning low lighting. There also isn’t much to latch onto during monotonously frantic zombie attack scenes, which were filmed with vibrating, but visually stabilized hand-held camerawork.
A zombie scenario that doesn’t have much use for its zombies, “This is Not a Test” still mostly coasts thanks to its young cast members’ efforts. They heroically struggle with unwieldy dialogue and do their best to enliven indistinct material that even classically trained thespians would struggle with. But there’s only so much one can do with heartfelt tears and shouting. MacDonald (“Backcountry,” “Out Come the Wolves“) also seems a little too beholden to his source material since his characters’ load-bearing and starch-stiff dialogue doesn’t always suit the ensemble’s strengths.
What’s mostly lacking is a matter of character-enhancing detail, the kind that would better integrate the movie’s high-concept thrills with its heartstring-tugging melodrama. Soapy’s not bad, but “This is Not a Test” lacks the sensationalism or sensitivity to make it more than a wan misfire.
