de facto film reviews 2.5 stars

In 2017, a nearly micro-budget Japanese movie titled One Cut of the Dead upended the zombie, found footage, and horror-comedy subgenres all at once, garnering critical praise and making over 1,000% of its budget back in revenue. It famously features a single cinematic take wherein a production crew is filming a low-budget zombie movie, only to come face-to-face with the real monsters during the shoot. Now, a French remake called Final Cut seeks to capitalize on the original’s unprecedented success and share its carefree ingenuity with other parts of the world. Whether it may or may not do that effectively remains to be seen. Still, though it has its moments, Final Cut is a significantly less fulfilling and ultimately unnecessary adaptation.

Continuing to analyze this film without acknowledging its absurdly meta twist (practically the same as its Japanese predecessor’s) would be disingenuous, so if the reader is unaware of it and would like to avoid spoilers, please watch One Cut of the Dead before reading on. And now that everybody is on the same page, it is critical to understand that Final Cut acknowledges the existence of the Japanese product, with One Cut of the Dead‘s Yoshiko Takehara returning as the Japanese producer of the ambitious live-stream event that retroactively becomes the one-take film viewers see at the beginning of both films.

Takehara’s character proposes that director Rémi, portrayed by the impressive Romain Duris, take on the French version of the zombie live-streaming experiment, stating that the Japanese instance was a huge success. In this way, Final Cut is a somewhat baffling conjunction of reboot and faux-sequel. It is also essentially a shot-for-shot remake of One Cut of the Dead, but there are minor differences in story events and, most notably, characters. Examples include Finnegan Oldfield’s Raphaël, the French counterpart of Kazuaki Nagaya’s Ko, who expands the character’s cynicism in Final Cut and becomes something of an armchair director, and the always funny Jean-Pascal Zadi plays behind-the-scenes sound engineer Fatih, who appears to be a new character.

These characters, and a couple of others, pad the runtime with unique dialogue and humorous scenes, but that added runtime only makes the film clunkier. In contrast, One Cut of the Dead is incredibly straightforward and consistent. Still, nearly all the actors do a remarkable job, particularly Duris, with his vibrant yet chaotic portrayal of the director-turned-star; Bérénice Bejo’s Nadia, on the other hand, pales compared to Harumi Shuhama’s Nao. The film-within-the-film – shot in two total takes instead of the one as advertised – looks excellent and feels fun, taking place at the stellar Évry Racecourse.

Standing on its own merits, Final Cut is a fine enough film that encapsulates the incredible and simultaneously floundering feelings one undergoes making a low-budget movie, featuring some enjoyable effects, performances, and writing (despite some thinly-veiled racism disguised as humor), but it is far and away the defining project that One Cut of the Dead manages to be. Final Cut is missing the heart that makes One Cut of the Dead feel so genuine, and no doubt, the fact that it is a remake intended to profit off of the original’s success inherently shreds that same kind of sincerity to pieces. One exists as a love letter to disorderly, spirited, and euphoric low-budget monster movie creation; the other merely functions as a financial vehicle with little artistic purpose, and it is sadly easy to deduce which is which.

Final Cut is now playing in select theaters.