‘Z For Zachariah’ Review: Chris Pine, Chewitel Ejiofor & Margot Robbie Shine

For a while after Ann takes him in, they become like the first man and woman, fishing in the valley’s pristine pond, harvesting vegetables, rebuilding a broken generator and making guilty goo-goo eyes at each other.

Ann’s solitude is broken when John (Chiwetel Ejiofor) arrives in a contamination suit.

Two guys, one girl and the end of the world as they know it seems like a recipe for impassioned trouble if ever there was one.

In Z for Zachariah, newly acquainted Ann (Margot Robbie) and John (Chiwetel Ejiofor) sit on the front porch of her old family house, discussing the natural disaster that has decimated most of civilization, save for them. Loomis and Ann have remained platonic until now, with Loomis himself resisting Ann’s overtures. While he thinks he’s discovered some untouched paradise, he bathes under a waterfall that he doesn’t realize is contaminated, and Ann nurses John while he recovers from radiation sickness. She is less worldy and devoted to her faith. Screenwriter Nissar Modi adds a new wrinkle here, creating a schism between devout Ann and secular John by having the only available source of lumber be a chapel built by Ann’s father.

They have just begun hesitantly grappling with the issue of repopulating the Earth when Caleb (Chris Pine), a hunky miner who survived underground, pops up to complicate the equation. Robbie leaves behind the glam of “Wolf of Wall Street” to find Ann’s vulnerability, while Pine is allowed to show more depth as Caleb than he’s able to in his “Star Trek” franchise. With commendable restraint and ingenuity, the director turns what could have been a trite romance into a cerebral, often scary dance between three damaged souls, all searching for connection and love in a world that promises little more than loneliness. This isn’t a violent dystopian thrill ride, it’s a quiet, pensive, tense three-hander about humanity’s tendency to poison even the most idyllic of Edens.

Zobel brought this kinds of human relationships to an intense boil with his previous feature, 2012’s Compliance, a movie that literally had me ready to scream at the screen even as I was aware of its hammer-into-nail tactics. In this way, Z for Zachariah stands apart from the more evangelical postapocalyptic portraits that we get from narratives such as The Road or Oblivion, where those who survive are coded as the Blessed Chosen Ones. With Z for Zachariah, he goes in the opposite direction, favoring restraint over all, and it works for a while. The action here is mostly internal and the only explosions are emotional. The movie’s refusal to paint anyone in simplistic black and white terms – pun intended, I suppose – is also refreshing, with none of the characters’ beliefs or intelligence called into question simply because we may not agree with them. The perspectives of John the scientist and Ann the faithful farmer boil Z for Zachariah down to the struggle that underlies all such apocalyptic tales: the will of God versus the will of man.

Z for Zachariah is now playing in select theaters (New York & Los Angeles) and On Demand.