‘The Summer Hit’ Review: A Zombie Comedy in a Post-Pandemic World

With films like 25 Watts and Whisky, both co-directed with Juan Pablo Rebella, Pablo Stoll became one of the most distinctive voices behind the renewal of Uruguayan cinema at the beginning of the 21st century. Hard as it is to believe, 25 years have already passed since that film reshaped the country’s cinematic landscape, and the movies Stoll has made since have little in common with that early work. In fact, over the past decade or so his output has consisted of just a couple of radically different features—Hiroshima and 3—alongside several television projects. Stoll (or Stoll Ward, as he now presents himself) spent years trying to secure financing for The Summer Hit, a Uruguay–Chile–Argentina co-production that premiered at festivals in late 2024 and is only now receiving its local release. It is unlike anything he has done before—and, indeed, unlike almost anything produced in Uruguayan cinema.

The Summer Hit is a zombie movie. Or at least a film that borrows from zombie mythology to build a story that, for roughly two-thirds of its running time, has little to do with the undead. As is often the case with the genre, the zombies are announced early on, only to be gradually approached, along with the mystery of how they came to be. In the film’s parallel version of the real world—both familiar and strangely off-kilter—a pandemic reminiscent of COVID-19 forces people to observe well-known rituals: social distancing, roadside checkpoints, face masks, and vaccination campaigns. Against this backdrop, the film introduces three young women in a manner reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino and his many imitators, using a pop-inflected aesthetic borrowed from 1970s B-movies, also known as grindhouse cinema.

They are Ana (Azul Fernández), Malú (Malena Villa), and Martina (Débora Nishimoto, from Netflix’s Envious), three Argentine professional thieves—modern-day “black widows” who attend parties, drug hosts and guests alike, and make off with cash and valuables. On the run, they end up in Uruguay, planning to rob a large mansion in Maldonado owned by a wealthy patron who hosts artists. Pretending to be artists themselves, the women gain access to the elegant waterfront house, where—in the absence of Ramiro, the elusive patron—they are less than warmly welcomed by its three residents: a Black model (Romina di Bartolomé), a shy musician (Leandro Souza), and a Chilean artist (Agustín Silva). Once there, the desire to rob their hosts blends with personal attractions and, more importantly, with the emergence of something unthinkable even in the midst of a pandemic: the realization that the dead do not stay dead.

Anyone who has seen Shaun of the Dead will recognize what Stoll is aiming for: turning a familiar zombie narrative into a raucous comedy of manners, built around absurd situations that poke fun at everything from local customs (here, mate straws and thermoses are repurposed as lethal weapons) to the internal logic of the zombie genre itself. Featuring cameos and small roles by many well-known Uruguayan actors—starting with Daniel Hendler and continuing with Néstor Guzzini—the film leans increasingly into grotesque set pieces, with mixed results. It’s the kind of movie that works better as an in-joke, a citation, or an homage than as a fully effective film in its own right.

Written by Stoll alongside Adrián Biniez (director of Gigante and El 5 de Talleres, and also a co-composer of several of the film’s songs), El tema del verano is uneven, episodic, and light on its feet. It gains a certain dramatic weight toward the end, when more romantic, tragic, and overtly political elements come into play. Still, it never quite escapes its status as a piece of pop entertainment: a tribute to an overworked subgenre and, at the same time, an ironic rereading of the chaos unleashed by the pandemic and its aftermath.

Without fully exploiting its political dimension—which is present but largely sidelined by visual effects and escalating mayhem—the film seems intent on commenting on a post-pandemic world defined by chaos, mutual distrust, and a survival-of-the-fittest mentality. When a hammer and sickle appear among the available weapons, or when a familiar actor turns up dressed in Che Guevara-inspired attire, the irony is unmistakable. It’s hard to say whether a “new world” awaits. Perhaps we are already living in it—and it has very little to do with the one described in the books.