As someone entering their sophomore year of college when Warm Bodies hit theaters, I completely ignored this teenybopper film. Plus, Isaac Marion’s YA novel of the same name was far from anything I wanted to read in high school. (I say this as if I read anything other than Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide over and over again.) That’s not to mean I’m throwing any shade on those who were fans of the book or film adaptation, but a Nicholas Hoult-led adaptation of something I had no interest in really didn’t get my goose. Watching this film in a post-Nosferatu world is quite odd, and seeing how far Hoult has grown as an actor is impressive. It’s just a shame I had to sit through one hour and 38 minutes of Rob Corddry and Dave Franco in 2025.
Warm Bodies: A Zombie’s Unexpected Romance
Warm Bodies follows R (Nicholas Hoult), a semi-conscious, self-aware zombie who spends his days shambling around an abandoned airport with his zom-buddy M (Rob Corddry). R and M, and a small horde of slow-walking shamblers, leave the airport to go on a feeding run (walk) and happen to run into a group of survivors on a supply run. Julie (Teresa Palmer) and Perry’s (Dave Franco) team are overtaken by R and his crew, leading to R feasting on Perry’s brains. In this universe, feeding on someone’s brain unlocks their memories for that zombie. This leads to R falling head over heels for Julie and saving her from the rest of the zombies. As R and Julie “fall in love”, they realize the cure might just be the girlfriend we made along the way.
I’ll be blunt, writer/director Jonathan Levine has only ever made one solid movie. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane was a unique examination of the idea of the final girl and it was a hell of a directorial debut for Levine. Beyond that film, his career would be nothing more than [mainly] terrible Seth Rogen shitters. Realizing that Levine was the “creative” force behind Warm Bodies was really no surprise. Well, the only surprise was that Seth Rogen wasn’t chuckle-acting his way as the comedic relief zombie here.
Why Warm Bodies Fails as Comedy, Horror, and Romance
Not only is Warm Bodies not funny, it’s not scary. It’s not even romantic? R kills Julie’s boyfriend, kidnaps her under the guise of saving her, and then basically browbeats her into a necrophilic Stockholm syndrome. While I haven’t read the book, I kept saying, “That ain’t it chief,” throughout the film’s runtime. To boot, the film picks and chooses what it wants R to remember when it fits the narrative. It’s a mess.
The acting is fine and some of the zombie makeup is passable. But the skeletons look like mid-aughts, half-assed CGI. Warm Bodies had a budget of 35 million dollars, and they couldn’t even make the antagonists look halfway decent. You’re probably saying, “It’s a rom-com, chill out!” No! Warm Bodies feels like more of a cash grab on a waining-in-popularity IP that was quickly pumped out before the world forgot about it and moved on to the next YA property.
The Problematic Politics in Warm Bodies
What really gets my goat is the absolute mishandling of the film’s political undertones. Colonel Grigio (John Malkovich) is a pre-Trump oligarch who built a wall to keep the “baddies” out. It’s not until they realize that love cures all that the plague can be undone! It’s a hodgepodge script that says “Not all zombies are bad!” See! There are good zombies! And the good zombies don’t like the bad zombies! (If you can’t tell from my snarkiness, I’m using zombies as an interchangeable term for immigrants.) This political subtext is for the mouthbreathers who need to be force-fed the idea of empathy via overpaid white people. When in reality, all it should take is watching a two-second clip of kids in cages or reading that Gitmo was opened to “house” undocumented immigrants. Honestly, the idea of portraying the undocumented as brain-eating parasites that need to be taught about love is beyond highly offensive.
Maybe Warm Bodies would not have me so incensed if I had watched it in 2013, but I walked away from this film with a bitter taste in my mouth. It’s not a compelling romance, comedy, or zombie film. The over-sanitized idea that love cures all may have been more palatable in a pre-Trump world, but that shit doesn’t fly anymore. Resistance makes change. Someone who shares a name with a Mario character makes change. And after watching Warm Bodies, it’s clear that some shiny-shoed Hollywood insider doesn’t understand that.
