by Shahran Morshed
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ryan O’Kane, Emma Leonard, Jackie van Beek, Gary Sweet, Stephen Hunter, Duncan Fellows
Intro:
… an inventive premise, an appealing cast and a sharp instinct for the absurdity of contemporary middle-class life.
Wellness has become a business, happiness a lifestyle choice, and even a fermented drink can promise a better version of ourselves. In Claudia Dzienny’s Zombucha!, this appetite for self-improvement takes a rather grotesque turn. When Maddie and Leo, an ambitious couple struggling to balance their careers and plans for a family, steal a kombucha culture to start their own business, they get considerably more than they bargained for. Their creation becomes sentient, turning the dream of entrepreneurial success into a potential zombie apocalypse.
Maddie works as a special-effects makeup artist, while Leo is a creative director at an advertising agency. Both lose their jobs on the same day, leaving them to reconsider a future that they have spent little time preparing for. They want children but fear losing the independence and comforts that they have built around themselves. Starting a kombucha business seems like a convenient solution. After stealing a prized culture from artisan Kai and mixing it with herbs taken from their mysterious neighbour Blanche’s garden, they launch Thirsty Virgin Kombucha. The business thrives, but its strange product soon begins behaving less like a drink and more like a monstrous newborn.
Dzienny has a good eye for the absurdities of Australia’s aspirational middle class. Leo’s advertising agency, with its corporate jargon and ridiculous wellness rituals, is an easy but satisfying target. Maddie and Leo’s beautiful home is another telling detail: they have everything that should make them happy yet barely have time for each other. Their business follows the same logic as their lifestyle. Anything fashionable can be packaged and sold, even if they have little understanding of what they are dealing with. The Four Fathers, an eccentric commune with its own commercial interests, extend the joke. Here, even spirituality seems to have found a way to make money.
Emma Leonard and Ryan O’Kane give the central couple enough warmth to keep their anxieties believable. Their fear of parenthood is not simply a fear of children, but of losing the identities they have carefully constructed. This gives the film a more human centre than its outrageous premise might suggest. Still, the screenplay sometimes returns to their relationship problems when it should be letting the chaos unfold. The horror-comedy takes time to find its rhythm, and some jokes work better than others. A sentient kombucha culture offers enormous possibilities for physical comedy and grotesque horror, but the film doesn’t always push them far enough. At times, it explains its ideas when a stranger, more unsettling image would have done the job.
The visual details are among the film’s pleasures. Emily Jansz’s production design gives the different worlds their own personalities, from the couple’s carefully styled home to the unsettling farmhouse of the Four Fathers. The glowing jars in the kombucha laboratory make the culture look strangely alive, while the sound design lends its bubbling and squelching an uncomfortable physical presence. These touches create a world where the ridiculous can become genuinely disturbing. Yet the promised mayhem never feels quite as uninhibited as it should.
Beneath the comedy, Zombucha! is concerned with selfishness, fear and the cost of treating every aspect of life as a personal project. Maddie and Leo are not villains; they are ordinary people who want everything without accepting what any real commitment might demand. The film’s suggestion that love requires compromise is familiar, and occasionally too plainly expressed, but there is sincerity behind it.
Zombucha! has an inventive premise, an appealing cast and a sharp instinct for the absurdity of contemporary middle-class life. Its weakness is that it never fully commits to the madness that it sets in motion. The domestic drama and the horror don’t always work together, leaving the film caught between heartfelt relationship comedy and full-blown grotesque mayhem. Still, Dzienny finds something fitting in the idea that a culture built on greed can eventually turn monstrous. We only wish the film had let its own creation run a little more wild.
