The Battery' Movie Review

There's a stretch somewhere in the middle of The Battery where Mickey is just sitting in the woods with his headphones on, listening to a song. The camera doesn't cut. The song plays through. Nothing much happens. And if you're the kind of viewer who can sit with it, you start to realize that this is the whole movie.

This isn't really a zombie film, even though it has zombies. Jeremy Gardner's 2012 directorial debut is closer to a road trip about two guys who don't quite like each other but have nobody else left. The walking dead are background noise. The actual horror is having to share a car with someone whose music you can't stand.

Why this one's worth your time

The Battery is what indie horror used to mean before the genre got polished and trauma-coded. It was made for $6,000. It was shot in about two weeks. It looks better than movies with a hundred times that budget, because Gardner figured out the most expensive trick in independent filmmaking, which is that two interesting people in a frame, talking, is enough.

If you've ever felt zombie fatigue, this is the cure. Gardner does basically the opposite of every choice the genre keeps making. No grand mythology. No "we'll find a cure" road map. Ben and Mickey are just two ex-ballplayers drifting through Connecticut, fishing, smoking, getting on each other's nerves, occasionally swinging a bat at something that used to be a person. The zombies are mostly slow and mostly out of focus.

You watch it and think, oh, this is what survival would actually feel like. Boring. With long stretches of nothing. And then, suddenly, not.

The friendship is the film

The title is the giveaway. In baseball, "the battery" is the pitcher and the catcher, the two-person team that has to communicate without words. That's what the movie is about. Mickey (Adam Cronheim) was the pitcher. Ben (Gardner) was the catcher. They weren't close before the world ended. Now they're stuck.

Mickey is the soft one. He wants walls, a roof, a routine. He wears his Discman like armor, queuing up song after song to muffle the world he's been forced into. Ben is the opposite. He's loud and restless, weirdly happy in a way he probably shouldn't be. He sleeps outside on principle. He's the type of guy who treats the apocalypse like a camping trip he never has to come home from.

Watching them clash is the actual entertainment. There's a scene where Ben essentially forces Mickey to confront his first zombie kill that's uncomfortable in a way most horror films wouldn't have the patience for. There aren't really jump scares to speak of. The tension is the long kind, the kind that builds because you're watching a friendship fray a little in real time.

Standout performances

Gardner the actor and Gardner the director are doing two different jobs, and both of them work. As Ben, he's giving the film its energy, grinning and swaggering through a wasteland. He's a beardo who looks like he should be the lead singer of a band that opens for someone you've actually heard of. It's a charisma-first performance. You believe Ben could survive out there because he seems to enjoy it more than anyone should.

Cronheim has the harder part. Mickey is mostly internal. He's listening to music. He's staring out the window. He's not giving you much to read. But the way he plays the slow unraveling of a guy who refuses to accept the rules of his new reality is quietly devastating. By the third act, when most of his retreat strategies are gone, you realize he's been telegraphing it the whole time. You just weren't paying attention. Neither was Ben.

Together they have the kind of chemistry you can't manufacture. There's a looseness to their scenes that suggests a lot of it was improvised, or at least loosened up on the day. Gardner has said the production was very seat-of-the-pants, with scenes invented on location, and you can feel it. In a good way.

The behind-the-scenes story is wild

Gardner raised the entire $6,000 budget by asking ten friends for $600 each. The Volvo station wagon that becomes basically a third character was bought off Craigslist for $600, the same amount one friend put into the movie. Most of the zombie makeup was done by Gardner's then-girlfriend, Kelly McQuade, who taught herself the basics by watching someone else do it for about twenty minutes the day before the shoot started.

Larry Fessenden, the patron saint of American indie horror, shows up in a small role, which is a kind of seal of approval in this corner of the genre. Gardner has said the first cut clocked in at two hours and nine minutes, with no music and no color grading, and that he watched it back and was convinced he had made something terrible. Then it premiered at the Telluride Horror Show, started picking up audience awards on the festival circuit (including Best Feature at Scotland's Dead by Dawn), and the rest is the kind of word-of-mouth indie story that doesn't really happen anymore.

The weak links

It isn't perfect. The pacing is going to lose people. There are stretches that are basically Mickey listening to a full song with the camera locked on his face, and if you're not in the right mood, that reads as padding. The early zombies look like exactly what they are, which is the director's friends in cheap makeup. The film knows this and mostly keeps them out of focus, but the seams show in the first act.

Some of the dialogue, especially when Ben and Mickey are needling each other about nothing, feels improvised in a way that's both the film's strength and its occasional flaw. A scene or two could have been tightened.

What to watch out for

Watch how the geography of the film shrinks. The first half is wide open, sun-drenched, almost pastoral. The third act locks the entire movie inside a single car. That isn't an accident, that's the whole structural play. When the world finally does close in, it isn't because of zombies. It's because of two men who couldn't figure out how to live with each other.

Also keep an ear on Mickey's headphones. The songs aren't background. They're the only thing protecting him.

And the title does double duty. By the end, you start to wonder which of them is the actual battery, and which one is running out of charge.