Love and Monsters, review: Netflix comes good with a monster-filled doomsday romp

• Dir: Michael Matthews. Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Michael Rooker, Ariana Greenblatt, Dan Ewing. 109 mins

Milking doomsday for comedy sounds counterintuitive, but it isn’t – in fact, maniacal laughter, in something like Dr Strangelove, comes across as the only sane response. But there’s a related subgenre for filmmakers to dabble in: the end-of-the-world romcom. Emma Stone and Jesse Eisenberg got it together in Zombieland; the very title Pride and Prejudice and Zombies speaks for itself. The bromance of all time kicked off between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead.

Compared with these predecessors, the Netflix romp Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way; it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. It’s rueful and shrugging. A lot of the film’s charm announces itself in an introductory voiceover narration – a rare well-written, well-acted example, these days – from a main character who is really not having a very cool apocalypse.

Joel, smashingly played by The Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien, is a tag-along and a disappointment to all around him. Thanks to radioactive fallout, Earth’s creepy-crawlies have become giant apex predators, and 99 per cent of humanity have been wiped out – by some sheer fluke, he’s among the exceptions. Holed up in a bunker with a dozen or so rugged alpha survivors, and valued mainly for making the minestrone, he’s naturally the only one who’s single: things were just hotting up with his childhood sweetheart Aimee (Jessica Henwick) when disaster drove them apart.

When Joel’s parents got squished by something’s foot seven years ago, he just stood there frozen to the spot: a pattern that repeats itself whenever he’s face to bulbous face with an ant the size of a bulldozer, or realises he’s been resting his back on a sleeping mutant snail. His tendency to turn to jelly makes him a frustrating hero, but no one is more cripplingly aware of this fact than he is.

It’s only by Hollywood logic that the 5’ 8” O’Brien, who looks a little like Paul Walker’s brunette younger brother, gets patted on the head by co-stars here as a supposedly tiny nerd no one seems to find attractive. Thanks to the Maze Runner franchise and MTV’s Teen Wolf, O’Brien has an adoring fanbase who would have turned out in force last April, when this flick was originally scheduled to come out in cinemas. But the whole thing has a cosy quality that suits streaming down to the ground – which is not to say that the amusingly gloopy monster effects, which managed to score a neat Oscar nomination, are at all to be sniffed at on this modest $30 million budget.

Desperate to escape his coupled-up hellhole, Joel realises that Aimee is only 85 miles away – seven days’ travel by foot, but across terrain overrun with nasties. No one thinks he has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it. If it weren’t for the intervention of a stray dog, who becomes his best friend, an early encounter with a monstrous toad looks set to do him in; and then a pair of wilderness experts, Clyde (Michael Rooker) and his surrogate daughter Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt), get him out of the next clumsy scrape.

There’s a predictability to this hero’s journey that threatens to make things sag, but the film has an endearing habit of picking itself back up, dusting off the cobwebs, and flinging us into some fresh crisis. Joel’s failure to impress a feisty eight-year-old is very Joel, but those scenes click, partly thanks to the delightful punk-rock energy of Greenblatt, a star in the making who would do quite well as Rosario Dawson’s Mini-Me.

An entertaining third act, at Aimee’s base camp on a beach, involves a depressed giant crab and an Aussie ship captain with an escape plan, played by Dan Ewing, whose brawny handsomeness makes Joel groan the second he shows up. The script still has some decent twists up its sleeve.

The running constant here, though, is what a likably stricken character O’Brien creates, with his hangdog woe-is-me shtick and general fragility. Following the whiny romantic travails of a helpless coward could have backfired horribly, if the director, a relative newcomer from South Africa called Michael Matthews, didn’t trust in his leading man to keep us on board. O’Brien’s so switched on here that we genuinely care. For a Netflix night in – the last one in a while, if that’s OK? – it’ll do very nicely indeed.

Available on Netflix from tomorrow