Ambitious (maybe overambitious) Canadian zombie pic, set in Tennessee a few years after the end of the American civil war. The tale is told through the pages of the illustrated journal of our hero, Edward, as he returns home from the war to find a zombie outbreak taking hold, killing his wife and son, and following a brief flirtation with the concept of suicide, his continued attempts to carry on in a zombie (or "Dead-Awake", as he calls them) world. Along the way he meets and helps another guy who wants to rescue his sister from the clutches of a small but maniacal group of soldiers who have been experimenting on the living and the dead alike in search of a cure, and later they come across an old woman with a dark secret (that our protagonist doesn't stove this woman's head in when he learns her secret was in my opinion a flaw in the movie, but there you go).
The "illustrated journal" nature of the storytelling means a couple of things: Firstly, the film is heavily narrated. The narration is very good, done as it is by Brian "Original Hannibal Lecter" Cox, but there's a hell of a lot of it; so much early on in fact that I started to wonder if the film was going to be entirely dialogue-free, and that kept me "out of" the film, at least until it settled down a bit. And although I like a horror to take itself seriously, the narration went beyond serious into a layer of almost romantic yearning, like some of the po-faced introduction narrations that you get in videogames like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or similar. Secondly, many of what I guess would be the more grandiose set-pieces in the movie are animated, made to look like the sketches in his journal come to life. These animations are gorgeous, BUT they're clearly there because they're cheaper than staging whatever scene they're depicting, so instead of serving purely as the interesting narrative device that they're presented as (although they DO do that), they also serve as a reminder that this is a pretty low-budget film. Nowt wrong with that of course, but if the budget won't stretch, wouldn't it be better maybe to reign in the scope?
Despite these (fairly big) drawbacks, the film should be applauded for trying - and largely succeeeding - to do something fresh with two genres at once. It's well worth a look.
