For a fifty plus Gen X fed on the likes of Mad Max(1985), Independence Day(1996), Interstellar(2014), the future was always extreme. We grew up believing future would be dramatic, that civilizations will perish, skies would burn, and those terminator machines would potentially take over.
So, when I watched Watusi Zombie, frankly I was disoriented. Nothing seemed to be happening. The film just refused to move. Only later, with some reflection and readings, did I realize that refusal was the point. WZ was conceived by Cyril Abraham Dennis, a 2004 born Gen Z. Someone about my kid's age.
WZ set in Kochi, follows some young urban characters drifting through repetitive, low-stakes daily life. We see a 'Grindset' Gabriel, a performer at the open mics in the city, being accused of badmouthing a fellow performer. There are no literal zombies or any apocalyptic events, not even a clear narrative. Just Gen Z slang and sensibilities. Scenes pass off without any provocation. Repetitive dialogues with zero revelation. The film dopes you emotionally numb, building an absurd inertia into its structure. Objective seems to be to explore a dysfunctional post-pandemic, digital condition where life continues smoothly devoid of meaning.
To understand these cerebrally, I felt one needs to step outside one’s generational locus point and use 'entropy' as a cultural lens to make sense.
But first, why use entropy. We all know, entropy is the natural tendency of systems to move from order to disorder over 'time' and hence, towards states that require less 'effort' or friction to maintain. In physics, this means energy spreading out, differences flattening, and systems settling into equilibrium. Most importantly, the sense of time is lost once equilibrium is achieved.
Such a lens is apt for understanding generational perspectives because each generation encounters society and ensuing inevitable entropy at a different stage of cultural life.
Watusi Zombie does not depict a future in crisis. It depicts a future already settled into equilibrium. Like entropy has maxed out. Brainrot is no longer a phase or a meme, but a condition ingrained into characters, narration, and the plot itself. The characters move, talk, drift and most importantly repeat. Scenes begin and end without any narrative pressure. Dialogues do not bother to reveal and appear pointless. Rhythm (like some tribal watusi beat) exists, but with no direction.
From a Gen X lens, this initially feels like absence: Where is the metaphor? Where is the conflict? Where is the critique? Meaning? Any artform must have a meaning. But that expectation itself is generational. We were trained to believe that that even absurdity must eventually reveal a hidden structure. Kafka’s characters suffered because meaning was inaccessible—but they still believed it existed somewhere behind the system. Even Camus concluded that Sisyphus must have figured out and be smiling in defiance.
But Watusi Zombie is definitely post-Kafka and Camus. Here, even the expectation of meaning has thinned out. It is not Gen X dystopia as sime catastrophe, but dystopia depicted as equilibrium.
That’s why the film feels “pointless” to many viewers. No wonder, those abuses that litter the comments (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HH4tRVGBKs ) . People feel robbed of an hour. But on reflection, this pointlessness is not accidental but structural. Brainrot is not portrayed as some individual failure or moral decline. It is what consciousness may finally feel like, to a post-pandemic, post-digital saturated 'zany Gen Z' with no gradients to condense or elicit meaning. Hence an experience of endless repetition stripped of friction is depicted.
As a Gen X viewer, I felt this film does not even expect me (as a dad) to fix anything. It was as if my own kid said: this is how it feels inside the world you have given me.
And that makes Watusi Zombie a quiet radical. It refuses a typical cinematic narrative—the promise that confusion will be eventually rewarded with clarity. Most unsettling realization is perhaps, the future we feared did not destroy meaning. It made meaning optional. Worthless.
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