Eve Tushnet
at America magazine:
“Blood Quantum,” the sharp and bloody new film from the writer and director Jeff Barnaby, does something surprisingly rare in the relentlessly popular zombie genre: It makes the return of the dead a symbol of the legacy of past injustice.
In this fast-paced, startlingly gory, character-driven tale, the people of a fictional Canadian First Nations reservation watch the beginning of an apocalyptic zombie outbreak—and then realize that only people with a sufficient amount of Native blood are immune. Suddenly, they can choose whether to protect themselves and watch the white people destroy one another, or try to keep a haven for uninfected non-Natives, even at the risk of their own safety.
The choices the characters make are shaped by their personal pasts as well as the generational trauma of occupation, loss of land and destruction of culture. In “Blood Quantum,” the past isn’t dead—it’s coming to get you.
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