Asia is the undisputed champion of horror movies. Japanese and Thai cinema are known best for their spectral hauntings. For more corporeal monsters, you only need to look to South Korea, who have been a real heavyweight, producing zombie movies and TV shows aplenty. Few, however, would consider the Philippines in the same weight class. Which is why Carlo Ledesma’s Outside is a significant new contender in the zombie subgenre of horror.
When the zombie apocalypse happens, Francis Abel brings his wife, Iris, and their sons, Joshua and Lucas, to his family’s colonial mansion in the countryside. Far from other people, Francis believes they can sustain themselves and heal in peace. You see, all is not well with the Abels, as Francis and Iris are reeling from revelations of infidelity. They were headed for separation when the end of the world happened.
But much like a zombie bite, Francis’s unhealed wounds from Iris’ betrayal, and his own childhood trauma at the hands of an abusive father, begin to fester. Slowly, the family rots from the inside out, and the threats within the mansion grow more sinister than the dangers lurking outside. Iris and her sons soon realize that monsters can live with you, and even within you.
In this post-civilisation frontier world, self-sufficiency is paramount and tied to manhood. Francis pressures his oldest son Joshua to learn survival skills – which include shooting a gun and dealing with corpses. As father and son become locked in a sad, twisted, Oedipus complex, Francis grows convinced that his family will leave him. And so he begins to gaslight them, staging zombie attacks, and laying down the law that nobody can leave.
Trapped inside a house that holds his childhood demons, Francis begins channelling some serious Jack Torrance vibes. Ledesma captures the horror of domestic violence and gender-based assault that is sadly a part of the machismo culture of the Philippines. The infection that takes hold of Francis isn’t the zombie virus, but the poison and paranoia of toxic masculinity that legitimises this patriarch’s campaign to terrorise his family.
For all the abuse and brutality Francis unleashes, the scariest moment for me was when he forces his family to celebrate Christmas in September in order to take their minds off the apocalypse. While celebrating Christmas the moment the ‘-ber’ months begin is very Filipino, Iris and her sons know that beneath the veneer of winter sweaters and fairy lights lies a monstrous rage in a man they once, and still, love.
While Outside may not be a landmark zombie movie, it is still an important and very welcome addition to the canon. Ledesma gives us a quiet, mature film that excels in its restraint. It never dwells in unnecessary gore or violence, but tells its tale of one family’s deeply personal fight for survival and redemption.
The acting is also solid. As Francis and Iris, Sid Lucero and Beauty Gonzalez give achingly tender performances as a couple struggling to keep it together while facing both the end of the world and the end of their relationship. And the fight scene on the bridge, where Francis fends off a pack of undead, should get Lucero praise for his performance that was, at once, athletic and balletic.
Another thing Ledesma does well is to forego the temptation to explain the zombie apocalypse or how it happened. By this stage, any discussion on zombie biology would just be rehashing lore that modern audiences already know very well. So Ledesma skips unnecessary exposition and dives right into the action. What I did appreciate is that Ledesma gives his zombies an unusual twist: the power of speech.
Now these zombies aren’t conversationalists. Instead, they repeat just a word or sentence. Ledesma uses this ability to great effect, as there’s something hauntingly sad about a person trapped in a loop, saying the last things they uttered in life. But there is hope. Unlike Western zombies, which can go on indefinitely, there are signs that the ones in Outside are slowly dying off. For better or worse, humanity may yet recover and prevail.
With its Asian sensibilities on family life, colonial aesthetics, and unforgiving humidity, Outside shows off the best of Southeast Asian horror. By centering the action in a Filipino context, Ledesma gives the zombie subgenre a fresh shot in the arm, helping revive a monster trope that has been so overdone in recent decades that it’s sometimes at risk of atrophying.
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