Z-GOAT: First Bleat
2018 · 12m · Belgium
Directed by Julien Jauniaux, Bertrand Leplae
Genres: horror, sci-fi, thriller
In a post-apocalyptic 2078, young huntress Darwina and her father encounter a new threat: a mutant goat-creature from the Z Dimension that preys on scavengers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A post-apocalyptic goat-creature from the Z Dimension should be ridiculous, and somehow these Belgian directors play it completely straight—the tonal commitment to cosmic horror via livestock is exactly the kind of "wait, WHAT?" premise that makes consensus critics squirm and then secretly love it.
The film situates itself in a lineage of body horror and creature-feature craft, with careful attention to how mythology is constructed through restraint and sound design rather than spectacle—a measured approach to the absurd that respects both genre tradition and formal discipline.
The decision to treat the mutant goat with genuine mythic dread rather than camp or comedy is the single choice that transforms what could be a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling, and it's executed through minimal budget constraint turned into an asset.
Reviews
The nature has taken over and there is no sign of other living human beings. That the name of one of the two survivors Darwina as a bit of a spoiler regarding the 'survival of the fittest' reference doesn't do the harm, is due to a well-balanced plot, but it also points out at the possibility that we might be witnessing a future in which the roles of humans and animals have been reversed.