He gives you reason to care through the laughs. Wright directs with an eye for understatement, mining deadpan comedy from a dwindling band of survivors constantly on the verge of hysteria, but also registering every loss with genuine empathy and gravity. Part deadpan farce-the survivors are downright unfazed at the sight of the shuffling undead-and part bloody slapstick spectacle, it isn’t a spoof so much as an ingenious twist on a familiar genre, right down to an inspired coda that answers all the questions left open in every previous zombie apocalypse: what happens next? The priceless solution is as inevitable as it is hilarious. It takes the end of civilization as we know it to rouse a rudderless slacker into action… as soon as he shakes off his hangover and notices that his street is a war zone filled with groaning flesh eating zombies.
Shaun (co-writer Simon Pegg), a twentysomething white collar nowhere man, is happily inert in a life of comfortable non-existence and non-commitment, much to the dismay of his long-suffering girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) and the delight of his slovenly best mate (Nick Frost).
Image a Brit-com reworking of George Romero’s Dead trilogy. Director/co-writer Edgar Wright and co-writer/star Simon Pegg’s self-proclaimed “rom-zom-com” (romantic zombie comedy) Shaun of the Dead (2004) simply nudges it over the edge. The apocalyptic hysteria of the zombie film has always been pitched on the edge of comedy: a horrible black joke played on humanity by a god with a sick sense of humor.