Comment

Nov 13, 2018chriscoleman rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Z for Zachariah is taken from the novel of the same name, but tamed down considerably. The novel was really, really dark. Even as dark as the film gets, it's nowhere as bad as the novel. In a small valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains one town has been spared from what appears to be a nuclear holocaust. That town, led by a preacher, feels it is their moral obligation to go out into the world and save people by bringing them back. They had no idea what they were doing. And they left behind the preacher's sixteen year old daughter Ann and his thirteen year old son (unnamed). Shortly after the elders leave, Ann's brother leaves too, determined to find them and bring them back. He never returns. So at the opening of this film, Ann is all alone and has been for six months. She's depressed and about to give up. Then one day she comes across a stranger pushing a cart of supplies and wearing a hazmat suit. Upon realizing that the air is untainted in this valley, he removes the hazmat suit and then begins bathing in contaminated water (it comes from outside the valley). She tries to warn him but is too late, so she takes him into her home and nurses him back to health. He's an engineer named John Loomis. An uneasy partnership evolves between Ann and John. Ann falls in love with John, but John is a bit of a racist and puts her down a lot of the time--first her religion, then her food choices, then her being white. It isn't until a third person, a young miner from a nearby county, arrives in the valley that John realizes he is in love with Ann. The young miner is Caleb and Caleb is a habitual liar. At first the lies are small but then they get bigger. John takes advantage of the fact that there is another man around and designs a wheel to install over the waterfall to generate electricity. Caleb quickly makes himself indispensable to Ann. He pretends to be deeply religious. He pits her against John by telling John not to tear apart her father's church for the wood necessary for the power wheel, but John takes it anyway (Ann tells him to because they need the power for the winter). Little things here and there make it appear to Ann that Caleb is the only one interested in her so she eventually sleeps with him. Then everything changes. Don't want to give away the ending, but I encourage you to watch this a few times. Every time you'll see something new and realize that maybe the ending wasn't so sad after all. Maybe it's for the best. As for the title, Ann mentions about a fourth of the way into the film that she was tought the alphabet by a bible book that started with the first man, A for Adam, and ended with the last man, Z for Zachariah. It's a play on the idea of the last man on earth who turns out to be John.