The end of the world as we know it gets closer and closer with each passing day, but how do you plan to spend the apocalypse? For the protagonist of Meera Menon’s Didn’t Die, the apocalypse has been a bummer, but mostly because her podcast audience is shrinking away as they get eaten by the living dead. With a couple clever twists and a strong sense of good-humored doom ‘n’ gloom, Didn’t Die presents a very tangible vision of what the immediate aftermath of a zombie outbreak might look like.Â
Celebrating its World Premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival as an official selection of the Midnight section program, Didn’t Die stars Kiran Deol (Destroy All Neighbors) as Vinita, a post-apocalyptic podcaster hustling to grow her ever dwindling audience while searching for her place in this new nightmare world. Thankfully, Vinita‘s got fans! And she travels town to town hosting live events and capturing This American Life in their new ramshackle reality. While visiting family in her old stomping grounds, she runs into old friends and even stokes the fire of a potential new relationship. But just as the world is starting to resemble something close to what they all lost, the zombie horde surrounding them begins the evolve and the world threatens to swallow them once more.Â
“Didn’t Die presents a very tangible vision of what the immediate aftermath of a zombie outbreak might look like.”
Every contemporary zombie movie feels the need to do something new with its monsters. They’re fast, they’re slow, they’re blind, they’re technically mushrooms, etc; The ghouls of Didn’t Die are nocturnal, practically catatonic and safe to approach during the day. But when the sun goes down and moon comes up, the docile undead come to life and eat everything in sight. Like a teenage gamer during summer vacation. The living take advantage of this behavioral pattern to go about their lives but their fatal flaw is in the assumption (a recurring bug in the human psyche) that nothing could ever rock the status quo. Womp-Womp.Â
As a zombie movie, Didn’t Die is straight out from the Elevated Horror playbook (practically a Sundance prerequisite), closing the curtains just as the story finds its footing. The epilogue makes for a great bedrock to a solid story, but it’s more interested in the personal human connections at the heart of this apocalyptic tale. That said (and assuming I’m not looking too far into things) it’s a post-apocalyptic fable about our inability to forecast a safer future in the face of immediate danger. We are all pre-occupied, willfully oblivious frogs in a 40,000 KM pot that’s 71% water, slowly being boiled as the temperature rises- and Dont’ Die knows it.
“a post-apocalyptic fable about our inability to forecast a safer future in the face of immediate danger.”
Meera Menon’s Didn’t Die celebrated its World Premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival as an official selection of the Midnight section program. Click HERE to follow our continued coverage of the festival and let us know what your plans are for the apocalypse over in The Official Nightmare on Film Street Discord!
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