In the Flesh: Overlord

The script isn’t much, the score’s already departed entirely from my memory, and where the story isn’t bog-standard it sags and loses its direction, but Julius Avery’s Overlord scores considerable points for knowing exactly what it is. At no point does it attempt to escape its pulpy roots or offer complex commentary, and while the end result is shallow it manages to be both largely good to look at and entertaining. Jovan Adepo is charming as the young and idealistic Private Boyce, Pilou Asbæk grotesque as rapist SS piece of shit Wafner — Mathilde Ollivier even finds a great performance somewhere in her underwritten role as a French woman, Chloe, living under Nazi occupation. The supporting cast is strong, too, from John Magoro as gum-chewing sharpshooter Tibbet to the underfed Dominic Applewhite as Private Rosenfeld.

The film’s effects, both CGI and practical, are a solid few cuts above the typical B-movie’s. The beautiful explosions in the final act made me sit up and blink, I’d gotten so used to the airless fireballs and generically crumbling masonry of modern CGI disasters. Even the “if less is more, imagine how much more more would be” opening aerial sequence looks better than it has any right to. The transformation body horror effects are only intermittently successful, plagued by the same generic “black veins” that have infested so much Hollywood creature design, but the blown-apart jaw of the resurrected Wafner is a slimy, gory delight and the genuine goop drizzled over slick prosthetic skin gives it just enough reality to pass muster, unlike the botched introduction of the transformative serum when Boyce resurrects a dead squadmate.

It’s that first resurrection scene and everything surrounding it that really hits the movie’s sourest note. A lot of canned, shopworn back and forth about following orders and “becoming the enemy to defeat the enemy”, some deeply boring stop-and-start action, and the overall tediousness of what should be one of any necromantic horror movie’s first big scares bog the whole attic sequence down until it feels like tires spinning in mud. Still, that hiccup aside the film’s action is largely tense and satisfying, its mad science admirably gross, and its sets pleasantly well-dressed. Overlord’s rural French village is a real pleasure to look at, all period stonework and dark, narrow alleyways cutting between broad streets paved in stone. The film makes good use of color, too. When Boyce crawled out of the water onto vibrant green grass I felt real relief at not being stuck in another industrial-park-gray nothing of a blockbuster. Overlord is a minor pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.