Curfew Review

Curfew is a British action dystopia series that has a talented cast of big and emerging names. What was delivered was the TV version of a B-Movie.

In the near future Britain has a nightly curfew to protect civilians from zombie-like creatures called Mooks. During the curfew is an annual race from London to Scotland. The winner gets to go to an island for sanctuary. The racers in the competition include a suburban London family, a crime lord (Sean Bean) and his heavily pregnant girlfriend (Rose Williams), and a man who might hold the cure for the disease.

Curfew was a mash-up of many action and horror films and putting it in a TV show. There were elements of Death Race, 28 Days Later, Doomsday, I Am Legend, Mad Max, and Wacky Races. The references to those films were blatant. Like Doomsday, the virus originated in Scotland, the virus first came about after experimentation on primates, like the opening of 28 Days Later, the Mooks were fast zombies, also like 28 Days Later, and the Mooks were sensitive to ultraviolet light, just like the infected in I Am Legend. It makes Curfew derivative. The series aimed to be an action-packed, bloody affair but was trying to bring its sci-fi world on a TV budget.

Many of those aforementioned films were fast and frantic. None of them were any longer than two hours. Curfew had to tell its story over eight episodes. Nor did it help that the series takes place over one night since the drive from London to Scotland isn’t that long. It’s not like the drivers had to go across America or Australia from coast to coast. The series had to fill its runtime with lots of flashbacks to justify the characters’ motivations and the backstory that showed how the Mooks came to be. It was a case of the showrunners having to overcomplicate a simple premise.

Where Curfew does succeed was with its casting. The series was brimming with talent. There were established features like Sean Bean, Adrian Lester, Harriet Walter, and Miranda Richardson. There were also lots of raising stars like Phoebe Fox, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, and Rose Williams. It was the younger actors that were front and centre. The most impressive cast member was Williams because she played against type. Williams is usually known for playing prim-and-proper characters like in Sandition and The Power, but in was Curfew she was Madame Chav. It was fun watching a heavily pregnant woman going around with guns, but her dialogue was grating at times because half of it was made up of swear words.

Whilst the series had issues with its story and length I can’t deny that I breezed through the show. I binged through it pretty quickly, so it was able to hold my attention. It’s down to it having a B-movie charm to it.

Curfew was a project that could have been a fun two-hour film, but it was overstuffed with characters and storylines. It is worth watching if you’re a fan of Rose Williams.