-By Maitland McDonagh

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West Africa, the near future: Crammed with American and English military personnel, aid workers and civilians, the last plane out of apocalyptic zombie hell crashes into the ocean while making a desperate attempt to reach a small airstrip somewhere in Sierra Leone. The only survivors are a wounded mercenary and American Air Force engineer Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman), who's forced to make the first of an endless series of life-or-death moral decisions within moments of washing ashore.

Murphy just wants to get back to his wife and daughter, and has seen enough to know that the bitten are doomed, the weak are a liability and simple human decency a luxury that can get a man killed in a pitiless landscape where dehydration is as dangerous as the cannibal dead. All he has going for him is that he's armed and knows machines well enough to get a junked car running and might be able to keep it going long enough to reach that airstrip. Nothing stops the living dead in their remorseless search for flesh—not broiling sun, nighttime cold, fatigue or thirst or despair—but they can't out-shamble a motor vehicle.

Meanwhile, army deserter Sergeant David Dembele (Prince David Osei, a star in his native Ghana) has made his way home on foot in hopes of finding his wife and son. But he arrives too late: His village is a blood-streaked ruin and his wife is dead. A dying neighbor holds out a small ray of hope, whispering that Dembele's boy (Gaal Hama) was rescued from the carnage by a northbound military convoy. So Dembele starts walking, his advantage—aside from the fact that he too is armed, and has a machete to fall back on when the bullets run out—being that he knows the terrain and has been negotiating its rigors since he himself was a child.

The two men eventually cross paths and merge their complementary skills with the tacit understanding that if Dembele guides Murphy to the airstrip, Murphy will let him take the car so he can continue searching for his son. But the airstrip is an abandoned ruin and the car dies, so the men continue on foot, trudging through a surreal landscape of red dust, thorny trees, desperate survivors and silent, lurching zombies no less lethal for their shattered bones, clouded eyes and gaping flesh wounds.

Though not as deliriously gory as many contemporary zombie movies, The Dead is also more haunting by virtue of its relentless stillness and the naggingly insistent shadows of a tantalizingly ambiguous subtext that lurk at the edges of its sun-seared frames. Though the U.K.-born Ford Brothers, Howard and Jon, cite George Romero's Dawn of the Dead as a seminal influence, they don't lead with their politics. The endlessly repeated image of a well-fed white man gunning down skeletal black people is a potent one, but no more so than a sleekly uniformed black man turning his gun on ragged civilians. Do the zombies embody the erupting rage of generations of Africans disenfranchised by the legacy of colonialism? Or are they a plague-like Ebola, incubated in Africa and destined to lay waste to rapacious, destructive human parasites of every kind? While some horror fans would no doubt prefer more flesh-ripping, gut-chomping gross-out sequences, others will appreciate The Dead's subtle variations on a well-worn theme.