Overlord is a… well, okay. SPOILER warning right off the bat.
Overlord is a war movie crossed with a horror movie, and oddly enough the war movie is better. If you cut out all zombies—maybe the Aunt really is sick, the lab is full of dead bodies and the serum Boyce uses doesn’t work, if you’re taking notes for your fan edit—you might actually have a better film on your hands.
War and horror are a tricky mix, not often attempted. What’s interesting about Overlord is the first half, a war movie in the tone of horror, as Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo) experiences the terror of combat and the pressures of being a soldier. Iconic shots, such as one in which dead soldiers hang from their parachutes in the trees, backlit by firelight, use the reality of war to evoke a subjective mood of horror. The tension of the mission combined with Boyce’s inexperience as a soldier and unfamiliarity with death makes for a very intense and strongly felt first half.
Arguably that story gets less interesting, not more, when it turns out that the radio tower Boyce’s squad have to blow up sits atop an underground lab where the Nazis are refining a supersoldier serum that makes corpses into zombies. The plot is the stuff of camp, or maybe a Captain America prequel, especially when the evil Hauptsturmführer (Pilou Asbaek) ends up injecting himself (as Herr Doktor shouts, “The serum isn’t stable! We’ve never tested it on living beings!”) so he can have a superpowered punch up with the Americans. By this point the film is locked into visually and stylistically treating this stuff as seriously as it can, which is not very, rather than playing into the camp, which might have worked better. The Marvel comparison isn’t facetious, since Overlord kinda feels like it devolves into a dark, dumb action movie in the last act.
That scene of the supernazi throwing soldiers around a mad science lab doesn’t really belong in the same movie as the much earlier scene where it becomes clear that local French woman Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) has been letting that same character rape her repeatedly in exchange for protecting her kid brother from being taken by the German soldiers. The realities of war are horrific, something the beginning of the film makes clear with eloquence, and by some strange transitive property the obvious fantasy of the living dead feels much less frightening than it might have if it had been the film’s sole focus. Perhaps this is because war is universal and zombies, or even disturbing wartime experimentation, is not.
Or maybe it’s just because the goal-oriented, action-based story beats of a “men on a mission” film simply mix poorly with horror, which generally requires your protagonists to be nearly helpless underdogs. The Blair Witch Project wouldn’t have worked if the protagonists were trained and heavily armed, and I know, because I’ve seen Dog Soldiers. Overlord doesn’t do itself any favors, either, by resting the fate of the D-Day invasion (and thus the whole war and the whole world) on that radio tower blowing up in time, such that you’re almost rooting for Boyce and the rest of the squad to ignore the zombies entirely and stick to the plan.
There is, at least, a strong thematic throughline to all this. Bryce starts the movie as a greenhorn who, the other soldiers relate, is so “soft” that he was unwilling to kill a mouse they found in Basic. Bryce does not want to face death, does not want to kill, is horrified by the sight of his fellow soldiers dying—and sees that rejection of death mirrored to the extreme by the science of the Nazis, who explain, “A thousand year Reich needs thousand year soldiers.” The key scene comes when one of Bryce’s fellow soldiers is shot and killed right in front of him, and Bryce’s shocked reaction is to immediately inject the dead man with the Nazi serum. The undead horror that results is so anathema to Bryce that he viciously beats the thing back to death in a frenzy of terror. Through the experience of war, Bryce learns the Pet Sematary lesson: sometimes, dead is better. He doesn’t lose his kindness, the humanity that defines him and makes Chloe trust and respect him, but he does make it his goal to eradicate the Nazi laboratory, even if that means disobeying a direct order to fulfill their original mission.
The corporal (Wyatt Russell) who gives that order ultimately relents, which is good, because the movie had nowhere else to go: the stakes of the war movie are so high that the horror movie still doesn’t outweigh it, for us, maybe in part because the film barely even pays lip service to the idea that this technology would be put to horrifying use in any army’s hands, not just the Nazis’. Bryce’s journey goes part of the way toward aligning both halves of this movie, but Overlord remains a film divided against itself. Enjoyable, yes, particularly due to excellent performances from all three leads. But broken, too. Consider this one a failed experiment.