Z for Zachariah is director Craig Zobel’s inaugural foray into the post-apocalyptic genre. It does not disappoint. The film is splendidly adapted from the 1974 science fiction book of the same title. Zobel orchestrates a character-driven drama that slowly builds a fragile tension, gripping the viewer until the end.
The film opens with Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) traversing a city in the American South suffering from a nuclear winter. The gray and ominous hues of the barren, city landscape suggest that she may be the only person in the world alive. She wears a mask and is on a mission to procure supplies. But instead of grabbing medicine or arms, she’s innocuously acquiring books from the public library. The opening sequence, like many scenes in the film, peer into the life and personality of Ann – someone doing her best to stave off loneliness. She is careful, smart, and has a type of naivety that is charming and hopeful in a desolate world.
Ann happens upon a man walking on the mountain road beneath her family’s farm – John Loomis (a spectacular performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor). Their meeting is awkward, as one would expect when two people who think they are all alone discover they are not. Ann’s naivety and blind trust in strangers forges their relationship, and John can’t help but reciprocate her contagious, empathetic curiosity.
The film explores their relationship and plays with the question, “How much do our pasts really matter?” Together Ann and John can become new people. John’s past and egregious survival tactics are forgotten in the radiance of Ann’s unconditional hospitality. Ann’s kindhearted love grows now that she has someone else around to receive it. Ann’s frame of reference for life is her faith, and John’s is logic and rationale. so the two are an odd match, but it works.
But then Ann discovers Caleb, a rugged and deviously handsome local man who claims to be on his way to a rumored survivor community further south. There is something off about Caleb. The camera frames his good looks with a sense of foreboding, but against John’s suspicions of Caleb, they welcome him into their home. The movie is more interested in John and Caleb’s rivalry, which has a Cain and Abel feel, than in the tussle between religion and rationale. The film builds masterfully on this uneasy tension of gloom and keeps you guessing, clueless as to what might happen next.
This Cain and Abel motif and the film’s title could be a baleful intimation to the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:35, where he ties together the first “prophet” killed, Abel, and the last, Zechariah. In addition, the film’s title is an attentive allusion to an alphabet book seen on Ann’s shelf – A is for Adam. The reference is obvious. The film portrays an Adam and Eve type situation in a perilous Eden. The problem is there are two Adams and one Eve.
Themes of love, jealousy, and resentment are sprinkled throughout the three character’s interactions. Race even enters the conversation as John, who is black, exclaims out of envy “You can go be white people together.” The film returns to the question asked above: Do our pasts really do matter? The film answers the question with a resounding yes. Personal histories and secrets come out and beg for forgiveness lest they alter the vulnerable triad permanently. In Z for Zachariah, we are reminded that we need help from beyond ourselves for a redemption that lasts.