Island Zero is directed by Josh Gerritsen and written by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling crime author of the Rizzoli and Isles series. While undeniably low-budget, Island Zero has a lot going for it –including excellent writing and direction and some stellar performances—especially by Laila Robins as the local doctor, Maggie. There are also some powerful location shots as the director mines the Maine island of Islesboro for its bleak beauty.
Island Zero quickly puts us into the realm of a quite conceivable dystopian scenario as it follows a marine biologist, Sam (Adam Wade McLaughlin), who is trying to figure out why the local fish population seems to have vanished—“sudden unexplained collapse of the fishery” he calls it. His wife, also a marine biologist who vanished mysteriously at sea four years ago, had been studying fishery collapse—a phenomenon happening all along the eastern seaboard. When she disappeared, she had been working on the theory that the fish were being eaten by an apex predator that hadn’t yet been identified. Sam, still grieving, has picked up her work and has become convinced not only that she was right but that the mysterious predator has moved up to Maine.
Here’s the trailer:
Along with every other islander and a few visitors, Sam and his family are trapped on what they find out is “Island Zero” when the ferry fails to show up several days in a row and all communication with the mainland is broken off. Several scenes shot in the island diner cleverly evoke Hitchcock’s The Birds, as the islanders (some of them anyway) become more and more panicked about their isolation, their dwindling food supplies, and, before too long, the inexplicable and bloody deaths of some of their number. (There’s another nod to The Birds in a reprise of the great scene in which Lydia Brenner [Jessica Tandy] discovers one of her neighbors dead in his bedroom.) Gerritsen does a great job with his cast of locals, who complement the lead actors and add important local color to the diner scenes in particular.
As the strange creatures encroach more violently on the islanders, they turn out to be pretty interesting, both in terms of what they are—one of the visitors trapped on the island, writer Titus (played expertly by Matthew Wilkas), knows more than he at first lets on—and also how they’re rendered on screen. And despite the destruction they wreak, they’re not entirely unsympathetic.
Those remaining on the island try to figure out what’s going on
Island Zero is a creature feature with a retro 80s score that looks back to classics of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, evoking most notably The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954), The Birds, and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). As in the best of creature features, the creatures of Island Zero, in all their strangeness, push us beyond the boundaries of our known world. Humans (and what we do know) are definitely implicated—there’s a fair amount of talk of climate change, and I couldn’t help but think of recent ecohorror films like The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, 2008) and The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012). Island Zero also reminds us, however, that there’s more to the natural world than we know—and one of the ethical challenges facing the human race has always been how we deal with new discoveries. Needless to say, we more often than not fail that challenge.
Check out this video on the making of Island Zero.
An article in Maine Today talks about the Maine setting and the local Maine talent.
And if you want to read about one of the original creature features, here’s my post on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a classic film that anticipates modern anxiety about climate change.
Island Zero is available on VOD on Amazon:
