There is something perversely comforting about a zombie movie that knows exactly what it is. This Is Not a Test, written and directed by Adam MacDonald and adapted from This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers, does not reinvent the wheel. It does not even try to sharpen an instrument using a wheel as a grinder into something sharper that one could potentially use as a weapon. What it does do is give us a group of high school students, an outbreak in the first five minutes, and a locked building with questionable exits. You know the drill. Single points of egress are not your friend. Locked doors and barricades are. And yet, this one works….Mostly.
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MacDonald has always been good at isolating his characters and letting the intensity of life do as much damage as whatever monster is lurking outside. Backcountry weaponized the wilderness. Pyewacket (a personal favorite) turned adolescent grief into something feral and unknowable. So it makes sense that he would find his way to Summers’ apocalyptic YA nightmare and see not just zombies, but depression, numbness, and the fragile math of hope for teenagers coming of age during a crisis.
The apocalypse kicks off immediately. No slow burn. No viral think pieces. No scientist in a lab coat explaining what we already learned from cable television in 2005. The chaos erupts, and Sloane, played by Olivia Holt, ends up barricaded inside her high school with a handful of classmates and one deeply unfortunate adult. The opening will elicit connections to the brilliant cold open in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake.
The opening act is genuinely impressive. The larger set pieces feel expansive and chaotic in a way that belies the film’s modest bones. Cinematographer Christian Bielz uses clever framing and movement to amplify the scale. Streets feel populated. Panic feels contagious. It has the texture of a bigger budget film without ever quite announcing itself as one. There is a confidence in those early moments that grabs you by the collar. It doesn’t quite hum with the same intensity and action as the first few minutes of Dawn but with its budget especially it is doing a lot with less.
Once inside the school, things shrink in the best possible way. The location itself is interesting. It is smaller than you might expect, almost elementary in scale, but the film nods to that reality. The interiors are washed in natural light, which gives the early days of their lockdown a strange calm. Sunlight slants through classroom windows while the dead pound on the doors. It is almost pastoral. If you squint. Gross I guess I have been teaching long enough that a school can pass as pastoral.
Olivia Holt is the anchor. She is not orbiting some grand ensemble machine, but she is our way in. Sloane begins the film in a dark place, emotionally and psychologically, and the metaphor is not subtle. She is right there looking at her wrists in the bathtub as the film begins. The end of the world mirrors the end of her own internal one. Isolation, depression, and lonliness can feel right at home in a bleak zombie apocalypse.
Holt plays Sloane with a kind of brittle restraint. There are no showy breakdowns engineered for awards clips. Instead, she internalizes. Watches. Absorbs (sometimes too much). When the cracks do show, they feel earned. The film positions her as our point of entry into this collapsing world, and she carries that weight without turning the story into a one woman showcase. It is a performance built on accumulation rather than explosion. The film is quite comfortable positing that some people’s lives were over long before zombies started biting people. Sloane just might be that type of character.
The rest of the teens largely behave like… teens. Which is to say they make some questionable choices, but not catastrophically stupid ones. There is one scene involving alcohol and zombies pounding on the doors that stretches credibility a bit. Liquid courage is a tough sell when literal decay is clawing at the windows. Still, the group dynamics feel believable enough. There is friction, but not immediate Lord of the Flies cosplay which is where I initially thought the movie would head. Part of me wanted the film to lean harder into that kind of social breakdown, to really interrogate what happens when adolescence collides with annihilation. It flirts with that idea, then pulls back.
A small gripe. The editing makes the passage of time inside the school feel slippery. Days blur in a way that is thematically interesting but logistically confusing. How long have they been there? A week? A month? Long enough for routine to set in, apparently, but not long enough for the film to give us the “life is not half bad” montage that might have deepened the eventual rupture. A brief stretch of uneasy normalcy would have sharpened the later chaos.
We Need to Talk About the Creeper Teacher.
As teachers here at Signal Horizon, our hackles go up fast when horror reaches for this particular trope. It is lazy. It is punching down. It is a shortcut to distrust that the genre does not need, especially in a story where the universe has already made it abundantly clear that adults are not coming to save the day. Make him incompetent. Make him cowardly. Make him devoutly unhelpful. But defaulting to predatory vibes feels hackneyed. It is the one element of the film that feels beneath MacDonald’s otherwise thoughtful approach to character.
Thankfully, the movie rarely slows down long enough for that frustration to dominate. The pacing is one of its strongest assets. Each set piece is propelled by the last with a kind of violent momentum. When the barricades fail and the kids are forced back into the world, the film shifts gears. The scope widens, but the narrative focus softens. It begins to meander in much the same way the characters do. What is the plan? Where are we headed? Survival is a goal, but it is not exactly a thesis.
The ending does not quite land with the emotional weight it seems to promise. It fits the tone. It is consistent. It is mostly inoffensive and a little mundane. And that might be the most honest thing about This Is Not a Test. It is not a reinvention. It is not a genre landmark. It is a solid, well crafted piece of high school horror with a thoughtful emotional core and a few frustrating shortcuts. It benefits enormously from MacDonald’s steady hand and Holt’s grounded performance. It stumbles where it leans on tired tropes, and it occasionally loses track of time in a way that muddies its internal logic.
But when the doors are rattling, when sunlight pours through dusty classroom windows, when Sloane finally begins to see a version of herself that wants to keep going, it clicks. The metaphor of hope in the middle of rot may not be groundbreaking, but it resonates. Sometimes survival stories endure because they are familiar. Because they speak to something we already know. Sometimes its just enough to survive the day. Or in this case, survive the test.
Tyler has been the editor in chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. He is also the Director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University a class that pairs horror movie criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he is not watching, teaching or thinking about horror he is the Director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.
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