Director: Junaid Chundrigar & Paco Vink
Writer: Junaid Chundrigar & Paco Vink
Running time: 14mins
Amid the prevalence of Frederic Jameson’s idiom, “someone once said it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, the foot soldiers of the end times are often portrayed as something other. An external force ushers in Armageddon, overrunning the best made plans of mice and men with irrepressible ease – at best, waving a hand at the decades of ruling-class malaise and social apathy which have weakened the essential services that might have stemmed the tide.
Suddenly the course of an asteroid the size of New York aligns with Earth, a volcano swells to bursting under a modern megacity, or the dead just happen to rise – and of course, it’s nobody’s fault. In the best zombie horrors, however, we see this trend reversed. The most reviled, shambling figures there are not part of the horde at all. They are the sensibly dressed, punctual, creatures of habit; the middle-of-the-road homeowner; the mythical Mondeo-man. The Moderate.
Resembling a noodle-armed Ned Flanders, the voiceless and nameless lead of Junaid Chundrigar and Paco Vink’s Dooie Boel is the embodiment of this formerly sainted demographic of voter – the perfectly bland political centre of the universe. A class of people who would never rock the boat, even as it sinks, while doing anything to maintain the status quo they believe they are thriving within.
In the reality beyond this film, in the wake of Brexit, Trump, and the Covid-19 pandemic, amid the steady ramping up of the global climate crisis, with genocide and war a new norm, the Moderate is not simply stumbling through a nightmare; they are playing a central role in its worsening. Having invested wholeheartedly in the idea success is an individual result – hinging on keeping their heads down, their nose to the grind, and their opinions neutered – the world is falling apart around them. The only response they can countenance is to pretend it’s still 2015 – and anything that challenges the routines of that fantasy are something to be resisted at all costs.
Here, the lead stands in for so many of those people. Built like a human pencil, sporting an impeccably trimmed moustache, every morning he wakes at the same time to collect the newspaper from the door of his neat-and-tidy suburban home. He engages in some crafting (his hobby is building and painting bird boxes), makes breakfast, and then cares for his mother. He has a distinct routine for her too, which involves putting on her glasses, helping her bathe and dress, and carting her off to the local DIY store, where the pair pick up more materials to build bird boxes together. The day ends with a little more woodworking, and a dinner of miscellaneous well-done meat. Having tucked his mother into bed, the man retires to his own quarters, to listen to bird song through headphones until he drifts off.
This man’s life might seem idyllic and serene – everything has its time and place. But look closely, and the frayed edges are already beginning to show. Each detail is curated or fabricated to slavishly adhere to some supposedly wholesome ideal. The million bird boxes in a garden conspicuously absent of birds, and the need to listen to synthetic bird song for comfort, point to this perfect existence being built on distracting hoaxes (after all, if there are no birds, that is a terrible sign for the health of the wider world). Central to that, one of the most important hoaxes, is the supposed weakness of the man’s mother.
When all hell breaks loose beyond the film’s sedate first act, the apparently feeble mother has to out-fox her son just to learn what is actually happening. Again, the character design is perfect here; jowls flopping with every movement, the stocky old woman suddenly proves far more robust than her wiry, twitching son. So, who was his care regime really for?
During this shift of roles, the mother shows surprising levels of strength, speed, and cunning – adapting to make the best of the situation, while her son steadfastly refuses to admit anything is wrong (a continuation of the ‘idyllic’ life he lived before in a world where – even without a zombie outbreak – we know things were terrible for a great many people). At every turn, one character fights to address and improve the situation, while the other makes things worse for everyone else by selfishly insisting that they keep to their particular routines.
This is a comedy-horror, very much in the vein of Shaun of the Dead. In both cases, the edit and design set out three distinct chapters in the story. An initial insight into the tried and tested routine of our lead character; followed by a nightmare scenario in which that character is faced with the choice of getting out of that dead end, and reclaim their sense of agency; and a synthesis where the old and new world are in aligned, for better or worse, in the conclusion. The animation of Chundrigar, Edwin van Beek, and Nicole Derksen is stylised, but also immaculately rendered, and tightly choreographed – meaning it is able to match Edgar Wright’s energetic edit for every ounce of impact.
But what arguably works even better here, is the way Dooie Boel deals with that synthesis. In Shaun of the Dead, there is still a feeling that the toothpaste can somehow go back in the tube – but this deceptively bright, cheery-seeming animation concludes with a far more pessimistic warning, about where the assumption things can simply continue like they were before leads. The centre cannot hold – and the Moderate’s insistence that everything is in fact fine, has more lethal potential than the festering cannibals roaming the streets.
In the world where Moderates have shifted in line with a disastrous new normal – from Mark Rutte declaring Donald Trump as ‘daddy’, to Keir Starmer sinisterly helping his voters into the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’ – the middle-of-the-road response to existential crises is mercilessly roasted by Chundrigar and Vink’s writing and design. Depicting this kind of person – a man so pathetic and in hock to the establishment that he wears a tie at home – as the core element necessary for a zombie apocalypse to prevail is an inspired piece of satire. There are probably more laughs than scares here – that is until you think about the real-world implications of that.
