If you’re craving zombie carnage, look elsewhere – HBO’s excellent new apocalypse show isn’t really about the undead at all. 

This review was first published on The Spinoff’s weekly pop culture and entertainment newsletter Rec Room – sign up here.

In the abandoned foyer of a five-star hotel, nature has taken over. Ducks swim across a floor reclaimed by a waist-deep pond. Moss, algae and ferns cover shelves, tables, chairs and stairs. A short burst of piano soundtracks the scene. It comes from a small frog sitting on the discarded instrument’s keys, kicks from its damp legs accidentally concocting a cute little tune.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” shrieks Ellie, who’s just discovered the scene with her older mentors Joel and Tess in tow. At 14, she’s only ever known an apocalyptic world overrun by zombies. Hotels are a relic of the past she’s only ever read about in books, yet here’s one right in front of her, and her delight is obvious. As Ellie wades through the flooded foyer in jeans and a hoodie, she runs her hands through the disgusting water and smirks: “This is so gross.”

Her trip down memory lane is soon interrupted by reality. At the front desk, Ellie rings the bell and pretends to be a wealthy tourist. “I would like your finest room please,” she slurs in her best approximation of an adult. This disturbs the skeleton of the hotel’s bellhop and it splashes into the water beside her. Instantly, guns, then groans, are drawn from the grown-ups in charge. “You’re a weird kid,” quips Joel, Ellie’s reluctant father figure. “You’re a weird kid,” she spits back. 

Memories of the undead are everywhere in The Last of Us, the umpteenth apocalypse show to land on our TV screens. Flesh-eating zombies bite at necks and tear at flesh. Trapped “clickers” and “stalkers” inhabit abandoned homes and roam city streets. They shriek like demon banshees, hunting humans for a quick feast. “Bloaters” inflate to the size of small buildings and thud through city streets like nightmare versions of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. 

They’re there, but The Last of Us isn’t really about any of that. Instead, HBO’s big-budget adaptation of the 2013 Playstation video game, one many consider one of the best ever made, wisely focuses on Ellie, the tough-talking, wise-cracking, old-before-her-time survivor, played here to insubordinate perfection by Game of Thrones standout Bella Ramsey. She has plenty of gun and knife skills, and little time for idiots. She may also be carrying humanity’s last gasp inside her.

It’s also about Joel, a stubborn apocalypse veteran played by Pedro Pascal. Jaded and psychologically wounded, he’s hoping to collect a pay day by couriering Ellie through the apocalypse and into the hands of those who can help. For those who’ve played the game, or its ultra-violent 2020 sequel, you already know what happens next. It’s one of the best stories – and most shocking finales – across any pop culture medium of the past 10 years. There’s no need to spoil those surprises here. 

Wisely, The Last of Us spends most of its time with these two as they reluctantly trek across the American wasteland. The game’s beautifully tilted buildings, infected basements, abandoned hospitals and bombed cities are all present and correct. Because this is from Craig Mazin, the showrunner responsible for Chernobyl, another show about an apocalypse, The Last of Us looks incredible, a widescreen epic that should really be seen in movie theatres, not on phones or laptops. 

The action, when it happens, is intense, violent, and visceral. But it’s Joel and Ellie’s growing relationship that powers The Last of Us. It’s because of them, not zombies, that you’ll fall in love with it – possibly after episode two, definitely after episode three. That’s because the show also finds room for detours. Across that 71-minute episode, an apocalyptic love story plays out with barely a zombie in sight.

The TV wasteland is filled with the lifeless bodies of TV shows that can’t quite get this apocalypse thing right. Netflix’s Black Summer lasted two bloodthirsty seasons. Despite topping cable TV ratings for years, The Walking Dead got stuck on a farm in season two and never recovered. By the time Negan beat Glenn to death at the beginning of season seven, most hoped he was putting the final nail in the show’s bleak coffin. Others, including several Walking Dead spinoffs, have tried, and failed.

But that’s not the only obstacle The Last of Us overcomes. Precious few video game adaptations have lived up to their source material. “Can The Last of Us break the curse of bad video-game adaptations?” asked a recent New Yorker story. Yes, it can, and yes, it does. It is addictive apocalyptic viewing that feels eerily prescient, with early scenes of infections and hazmat suits reminiscent of early Covid times.

Right now, a mutating virus is an easily understandable concept to anyone who survived the last three years. Throw in a real, heartfelt relationship, gorgeous cinematography, and occasional zombie mayhem, and the results are compulsive, addictive viewing that are going to dominate the discourse over the next nine weeks.

But by episode seven (all nine were provided to critics ahead of last night’s debut) The Last of Us proves it’s destined to be named among HBO’s greatest hits. Based on the video game’s 2014 add-on Left Behind, Ellie’s flashback episode spends most of its time exploring an abandoned mall. Yes, Mazin and co recreated an entire mall with working escalators, vacated stores, a video arcade and theme park rides.

Again, despite approaching zombie carnage, another love story emerges, one far more engaging than the shivs that end up slicing into limbs, torsos and faces. It makes what happens in episode nine all the more brutal. You will not emerge from this show unscathed.

That emotional resonance is the target most other zombie shows aim for, but failed to hit. This is far more Station Eleven than Resident Evil or The Walking Dead. No matter how much blood, guts and gore TV producers pour over their zombie apocalypses, it’s the beating heart underneath it all that really matters. The Last of Us zooms in on those moments time and again to remind us that, when things get bleak, there’s always something worth living for – even if it’s just a frog playing bad piano in a hotel swamp.

The most talked-about movie in the world right now is about a murderous dancing doll. Alex Casey talks to the Auckland girl who helped M3GAN find her groove. 

Amie Donald is just a regular 12-year-old girl. She loves building things with Lego, collecting Funko Pop Vinyl figurines and hanging out with her chocolate lab named Bear. She also happens to be the same 12-year-old girl behind the murderous movements of M3GAN, the killer doll whose viral dancing has propelled the campy New Zealand-made horror into the internet’s most talked-about movie. “I feel really excited, it’s a little bit crazy because it’s my first movie”, Donald says from her lounge in Auckland, Bear the dog nestled at her side. 

Donald is no stranger to the screen, having appeared in advertisements and, more recently, the Netflix series Sweet Tooth, in which she played a monkey, an owl and a meerkat. But dance is her first passion – at the age of nine she competed in the Dance World Cup in Portugal and took home a silver and a bronze medal, the first New Zealander ever to do so. This world-beating dance prowess would become vital in her latest onscreen role, where she performed all the movements for killer robot doll M3GAN (actor Jenna Davis provides the voice). 

While the internet has latched onto essentially everything about M3GAN, from her predatory four legged run to her chilling bedtime rendition of Titanium, no moment set the hashtags alight quite like the Megan dance. In the sequence, which takes place inside toy tech company Funki (shot in the foyer of Auckland’s AUT university), M3GAN unleashes a series of discombobulating and wiggly moves down a blood red hallway before brandishing an office guillotine in the direction of her next target. As of writing, the #M3GANDANCE hashtag has over 219.3 million views on TikTok.

Although she had to do some dancing in her audition, Donald says the dance was never in the original script. “One day Gerard [Johnstone, director] just came up with the idea,” she laughs. After what he has previously called a moment of 3am madness, the New Zealand director gave her and choreographer Kylie Norris a list of words he wanted the dance to represent including “creepy” and “distracting”, and the pair spent the day in the dance studio filming ideas. Johnstone then picked his favourites – scary jelly legs here, sassy shoulder shuffle there. 

When it came to shooting the dance, Donald remembers that everyone went “crazy” on set after her first take. “I thought it was pretty funny because you could hear them over the radio going ‘you’ve got to come see this’ to all the crew.” At the end of shooting the scene – she did just four takes of the entire dance sequence – Donald says the whole crew erupted into a round of applause. “I thought that was pretty cool,” she grins. 

While you might not be able to tell from her freaky fluid moves, Donald had limited vision in the M3GAN costume. Donning a high-tech latex mask, she had a 30 minute window before M3GAN’s eyes would fog up and she would have to take a break to wipe them down. With her voice muffled, she devised a set of hand gestures to communicate – thumbs up for “doing good”, hands crossed across the chest for “get me out of the mask” and one finger up for “one more take”. 

The dance sequence was just one of many dramatic stunts Donald had to do as M3GAN, including chasing a boy on all fours across the forest floor, and some time hanging upside down during the film’s dramatic climax. But between those intense scenes, Donald says her favourite part of being on set was spending time with Violet McGraw, who plays M3GAN’s “primary” user Cady. Between takes they would pair off into their own room to sing songs – including ‘Party in the USA’ and the Wicked soundtrack – before returning to the thrills and kills of M3GAN. 

Auckland was plunged back into lockdown immediately after primary shooting finished, with reshoots happening months later. After that were many more months of nothing, says Donald, until one morning when her mum woke her up excitedly: the trailer was out. “Then all of a sudden all the videos were popping up everywhere of people recreating the dance,” says Donald. “It was just so much fun watching everybody doing it.” Her favourite TikTok of the dance features a girl replacing the flip move with a rotating still image – “so funny”. 

Donald has just returned from Los Angeles for the world premiere of M3GAN, where she walked the black carpet with co-stars Allison Williams, Ronnie Chieng and a troupe of M3GAN dolls who opened the event with a suitably creepy choreographed dance. Although she’s back home in Aotearoa now, she’s not taking a break anytime soon. She’s in the middle of shooting the new season of Sweet Tooth, and has to find time to take her friends to see M3GAN in local cinemas – “they are a little bit scared, so we are going to watch it together.” 

After that, Donald will be crossing her fingers for both a M3GAN sequel and a M3GAN Funko Pop Vinyl to add to her collection – whichever the internet manages to make happen first. 

M3GAN is showing now in cinemas nationwide.