Sam and Doug
2022 · 17m · United Kingdom
Directed by Brendan Cleaves
Genres: horror, sci-fi, thriller
In a near-future where a virus has turned the population into rabid monsters, a desperate mother recruits her neighbour to help her get home and save her baby.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent pandemic-horror-with-a-heart, which is basically the consensus safe play right now—and yeah, the mother-and-neighbor dynamic subverts the typical lone-survivor arc, but it's still working in the familiar zombie-outbreak playbook rather than dismantling it.
Cleaves demonstrates formal control in how the survival narrative mirrors the claustrophobia of genre itself—tight editing, disciplined sound design—though the film operates within established thriller conventions rather than interrogating them, which limits its argumentative power.
The entire film hinges on the choice to make the neighbor's complicity—not heroism—the emotional core, and that decision to ground intimate character stakes in a high-concept premise is where the craft elevates what could've been generic into something genuinely affecting.