Don't Kill Me – review

Director: Andrea De Sica

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

I was contacted, separately, by Simon and Leila about this one (whose original Italian title was Non mi Uccidere). Simon suggested, “They say zombies but it’s blatantly revenants” and also warned that it has “an oddly abrupt end”. Leila wondered if I’d seen it as a friend had “recommended it to me as Twilight with sex”.

Let me take their points out of order… despite a romance element the film is not like Twilight, I suspect this comparison owes more to lead actor Rocco Fasano looking like Robert Pattinson if cheap-end retailer Wish did the casting (cruel but accurate). The word zombie is mentioned (so is vampire and werewolf), as Simon pointed out they call these resuscitated dead overdead and I guess you could say revenant (or just vampire) – for me their rejuvenating aspect, along with sentience, moves them out of the zombie arena. I’ll mention the ending later but Simon was right, it is abrupt.

taking the drug

The film begins with Robin (Rocco Fasano) driving with his eyes closed expecting girlfriend Mirta (Alice Pagani) to guide him verbally. This continues for some time, with her equally thrilled, amused and scared but, when she tells him of an oncoming tractor and he continues, she moves into terrified. Having avoided a crash, they pull into a quarry and she is angry but the spat is soon over. He prepares the drug he takes, she asks to try it but he refuses and then agrees on the condition it is a one off, she agrees if he agrees it is his last hit. The drug is administered through the eye…

in the morgue

Mirta’s parents look at her in the morgue, her corpse by Robin’s. Her mother says she would want to be buried alongside Robin, her father (Fabrizio Ferracane) against it. Cutting to the cemetery we see the mausoleum where she is laid to rest. We hear pounding and see the front break open and Mirta clamber out. She immediately sees Robin’s tomb next to hers but it is quiet. Her gait is stumbling, she seems weak (despite breaking out of the grave) and I can understand why the scenes of her heading home might bring the zombie genre to mind. She heads towards her parent’s.

message from the Benandante

The film does a nice line in memory, with us seeing something (from her pov) at night and it shifting to day as we enter the memory. At this point we get the memories of her seeing Robin for the first time (a poor bad boy, next to her rich good girl), their subsequent meeting and getting together. She reaches her parents and enters the house, tries to eat from the fridge, spits it up and then looks at her sleeping parents. She retreats to her room and her mom wakes. Mirta escapes the house but, in the woods, a large gang of men with flashlights and guns hunt for her. She hides up a tree and one of the men finds fabric ripped from her dress. When she gets back to the mausoleum she finds the fabric, a message from the Benandante (hunters of the ambulatory dead) wishing her a good walk written on it. She notices that her hands are blackening.

overdead eyes

She gets herself to a rest room and looks at her hands, they are darker still, her nails coming away from the bed – in short she is rotting. She looks in the mirror and sees her eyes looking large and black (in this scene the reflection seems to be different to her, with her own eyes appearing normal but later we see that the overdeads’ eyes do turn black at times). Meanwhile a man has come to see her father to demand he tell the Benandante when she makes contact. Mirta goes to a club (where she and Robin first got together) and allows a man to pick her up (mostly to avoid being noticed by one of Robin’s friends). The man takes her to the quarry; instinct overcomes her and she tears into his neck.

attack

So, the overdead are young people who died violent deaths – not all return though, it seems random. We didn’t see her death but the assumption is it was caused by an overdose. They feed on flesh and blood but only from the living – if their victim dies their flesh is immediately no good (so we can assume it ties to the lifeforce though this is not explicitly mentioned). They are hardy, really difficult to kill and the only sure way is to starve them – they start to rot if they don’t feed. At one point we see the Benandante accelerate the process by torturing (with an electric prod) an overdead.

torturing an overdead

The idea is interesting but I need to touch on Simon’s point about the ending being abrupt. It really is and (whilst I can’t say that it fails to close the primary story, as set out) feels like there was still much to say – indeed it feels like a feature length pilot for a show rather than a movie and it is a tad frustrating because of this. Nevertheless, it does tell a tale, the acting is just a little emo but good enough, and the film has interesting ideas with some meaningful world building (despite needing expanding on). In some ways the love story is the antithesis of the aforementioned Twilight and the sex perhaps unnecessary. If they were to do more, I’d watch them. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.