Your best friend just became a zombie
2025 · 1m · Vietnam
Directed by Thuy Trang Dang, Nguyen Le Uyen Thu
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A CinemaSHORT promotional clip drawn from the Vietnamese short film 'How an Apocalypse Ends', in which three teenage friends standing over a fourth who has just become the world's first zombie face an impossible choice: kill him to save humanity, or try to save him and risk a global outbreak.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone expects zombie films to be about cities collapsing or infected hordes—this one's genius move is making the apocalypse happen in a skate bowl to three kids who actually have to *feel* something about it. The premise flips the genre's entire engine: instead of spectacle, you get the unbearable intimacy of a friendship ending in real time.
What's formally striking here is the restraint—the film understands that the zombie subgenre's tradition is one of escalation, so anchoring the catastrophe to a single location and a four-person ethical standoff reads as almost classical in its compression. The tonal balance between dark comedy and genuine dread suggests directors aware of how genre conventions can be reframed through rigorous formal discipline.
The singular choice that makes this work is the decision to keep the camera locked on the friends' faces rather than sensationalizing the infected body—that discipline transforms what could've been shock-value horror into something about loyalty and impossible choices. It's a budget constraint weaponized into emotional precision.
Reviews
A tense battle between friendship and survival — three teenage friends must make a devastating choice: kill their best friend, who has become a zombie, to protect the world, or risk unleashing a global outbreak by trying to save him.
Lâm's struggle to convince his friends Bảo and An to make the unthinkable choice is complicated by Bảo's romantic feelings for the infected friend Minh — a coming-of-age premise compressed into a single edge-of-the-skate-bowl decision.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025, Special Mention
- Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF) 2025
- Ngilngig Asian Fantastic Film Festival 2025