‘Ziam’ Promises Thai Fighters Versus Zombies

The new Netflix movie Ziam takes a while to actually get to its fun, dumb premise: One heroic Muay Thai fighter is pitted against a horde of zombies. Instead, for twenty long minutes Ziam sets out its version of dystopia where a food shortage means that people have to eat bugs which in turn, somehow, causes the whole zombie thing. As bleak dystopias go, this is unserious.

Perhaps my first mistake was expecting something serious from a movie that aims to combine martial arts with zombies. There’s a reason we don’t see that combination very often: Even the fast zombies of the twenty-first century aren’t a credible opponent for a competent martial artist. Once Ziam gets to its premise, though, it clings on for dear life and it’s disappointing just how quickly Sing’s (Mark Prin Suparat’s) cool martial art moves start to get boring. The issue is structural. These brainless foes are quite literally incapable of catching on to what he’s doing, no matter how indestructible they be physically. Director Kulp Kaljareuk recognizes this problem, contriving an excuse for Sing to fight human enemies at the climax, which really should have been a clue that the whole premise was flawed.

That’s barely a spoiler because there are simply not very many places for the story to really go. The dystopian context is too poorly developed for any political decision to feel meaningful. The hospital setting, likewise, is at best just functional as just a place where a zombie outbreak could plausibly happen. Also Sing’s girlfriend Jin is there. She’s a doctor, so there are some hospital politics at the movie’s opening that almost immediately turn out to be irrelevant because, well, zombies.

Zombie flicks aren’t exactly known for originality, but they usually at least try to be interesting. Even Muay Thai with all of its balletic grace and effective violence isn’t enough of a gimmick to make Ziam watchable. That Netflix lists five screenwriters, suggests an ongoing problem with the script that was resolved by a sequence of writers paring it down to Muay Thai vs Zombies.

Who is this movie even for? Ziam doesn’t even have subtitle options for most Asian languages, which is especially odd since the only obvious audience for this movie is the southeast Asian market, where the South Korean flicks Train to Busan and Peninsula were both quite popular despite the latter coming out during COVID. It’s not like the marketing for English has been any good either.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that, over the course of writing this review, Ziam reminded me of other, better movies. Even a real plot summary is a bit beyond me here, to be honest. It goes something like: in the future, we eat bugs, and patient zero at some hospital starts turning people into zombies, so our hero sets out to rescue his girlfriend. That’s barely enough plot for a thirty-year-old video game, although frankly speaking, you’d be better off playing a thirty-year-old video game for 80 minutes than watching this movie.