What is wrong in 90% of zombie movies, what makes them SO bad usually? Running zombies, faster-than-eye-super-beast zombies, bad make up day zombies, CGI zombies. Here the crappy zombies simply are not the problem, though it has to be said, they're not that interesting either.
Sure, this one's got really nothing much to add to the sub-genre of zombie movies. But it manages to focus for a good deal on the characters and flesh them out discreetly far better than many other horror movies do. Enough to make them feel familiar, like people we all know.
Trying not to watch this as a zombie movie might actually help the movie. It focuses in the first half on the tension between the state and the small societies, families, and relationships. One could claim the focus is like from the opening of the Dawn of the Dead but with reversed roles - the main characters are not armed military here, they're unarmed naive civilians, and the military isn't any more sympathetic to them as it is towards the unknown viral threat. Also, like in the Dawn (...) the story line setting changes drastically after the first act, but... what could have been a commentary on how dangerous a thing a sudden power vacuum can be, the direction seem to stubbornly now... run towards the typical run of the mill modern zombie movie to please or embarrass the wide zombie sub-genre audiences. Depends completely on how you like your horror and how you watch movies. The latter half even comes with jump scares to add to the predictable remains of the plot. Which is a shame. There's also an afterwards added possibly optimistic ending that clearly contradicts an earlier scene and doesn't play well to the atmosphere.
The sound design is about as good as you can get, though there's no memorable OST. A zombie movie simply should not be released without a memorable OST, we owe that to Fabio Frizzi and Claudio SImonetti & Goblin.
