How An Apocalypse Ends
2024 · 14m · Vietnam
Directed by Đặng Thùy Trang
Genres: dark comedy, drama, horror
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
Three friends find their friend transformed into the world's first zombie in an abandoned skate bowl and must decide whether to save him or kill him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The zombie-in-a-skate-bowl setup *sounds* like every genre mashup ever, but Trang's refusal to pick a lane—letting it breathe as horror, comedy, and genuine grief simultaneously—is genuinely disorienting in the best way; most filmmakers would've defaulted to joke or jump-scare, and she does neither.
A formally assured piece that treats its high-concept premise with the restraint of a chamber drama, using the skate bowl's geometry and the three-body problem of friendship to explore how we ritualize loss—the tonal control here recalls Karyn Kusama's eye for moral texture beneath genre scaffolding.
The entire film hinges on how Trang holds the camera still during the moment of recognition—no cutting away, no reaction shot, just the friends' faces processing the impossible—and that single choice of patience transforms a silly premise into something that actually lands emotionally.