South Korean film “My Daughter Is a Zombie” tries to be a cross between horror comedy and family melodrama, and the result is mildly engaging on the whole. As a horror comedy, it is not absurd enough to be, shall we say, biting, though there are some amusing moments to tickle you at times. As a family melodrama, it surely tries to tug the heart of the audiences especially during the last act, but this is a bit too sappy and mellow with some blatant plot contrivance, and the movie eventually fizzles with its rather contrived ending.

The first act of the movie establishes how its hero has been stuck with his zombie daughter for a while. When Seoul is suddenly swept by a zombie virus epidemic on one day, Jung-hwan (Jo Jung-suk) and his adolescent daughter Soo-a (Choi Yoo-ri) are naturally thrown into panic and fear, but they and their pet cat manage to escape from the city by a car mainly because the zombies in the film are relatively less scary and fast compared to those fearsome zombies in “28 Years Later” (2025). Alas, it turns out that Soo-a was bitten by a zombie at the last minute, and she is soon turned into a zombie in the car to her father’s horror.

After managing to suppress his zombie daughter for now, Jung-hwan drives the car to his rural seaside hometown. His mother Bam-sun (Lee Jung-eun) surely greets her son when she returns to her house not long after Jung-hwan and his daughter’s arrival, but she soon comes to find what happened to her dear granddaughter. While naturally horrified at first, Bam-sun eventually agrees to hide Soo-a inside her house, and, what do you know, she turns out to be quite unflappable as assisting her son’s attempt to keep his zombie daughter under his control.

Because he has incidentally worked as an animal trainer in a local zoo, Jung-hwan believes that he can tame his zombie daughter, and he becomes all the more motivated as observing Soo-a still showing a bit of her human personality despite her currently zombified condition. With some reluctant help from not only his mother but also a hometown friend of his who is incidentally a town pharmacist, he keeps trying one method after another to our little amusement, and, surprise, there soon comes some little progress from Soo-a.

However, as being constantly aware of how dangerous his zombie daughter can be at any point, Jung-hwan also comes to fear more of the worst possibility for him and Soo-a. The government subsequently manages to get things under control via instantly eliminating any infected person, and it goes without saying that Jung-hwan should be all the more careful about taking care of his zombified daughter.

His circumstance becomes a little more complicated when he later comes across Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), his old sweetheart who recently moved back to their hometown as a middle school teacher shortly after losing someone close to her due to the epidemic. Needless to say, the movie attempts to bring more absurdity to the story as Yeon-hwa inadvertently gets herself involved with what Jung-hwan has tried to hide behind his back, but we only get several silly moments which sadly do not develop much of their rich comic potential. While you may be a bit amused when Jung-hwan tries to make Soo-a more, uh, presentable to others out there, this only leads to silly physical gags without any biting sense of humor, and the same thing can be said about the sequence where Jung-hwan tries something potentially risky just for cheering up Soo-a a bit.

Around the narrative point where the story becomes predictably melodramatic, we are supposed to care more about Jung-hwan and Soo-a, but the movie, which is based on the South Korean graphic novel of the same name by Yun-chang Lee, leans too much on sappy sentimentalism, and that is where my interest in the film became more decreased. To make matters worse, the movie unfortunately resorts to what may be wholeheartedly disapproved by any screenplay writing class, just because it does not want its audiences to feel bad at any chance when the end credits are about to roll.

The main cast members of the film deserve some praise for their good efforts for selling their respective characters. Although he initially looks a bit too young and immature to play his character, Jo Jung-suk fits to his role better than expected – especially after when the rather complex family history between Jung-hwan and Soo-a is revealed later in the story. While Choi Yoo-ri did a fairly commendable job of handling her thankless role, Yoon Kyung-ho is solid as Jung-hwan’s bumbling pharmacist friend, and Lee Jung-eun and Cho Yeo-jeong, who incidentally appeared together in Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film “Parasite” (2019), are wonderful as slyly balancing their acting between humor and drama. In case of that adorable pet cat in the film, I must report to you that it effortlessly steals its every minute, and its undeniable cuteness almost made me overlook many flawed aspects of the movie.

In conclusion, “My Daughter Is a Zombie”, directed by Pil Gam-sung, is neither very funny nor quite scary compared to many other similar genre works out there, but, considering the reactions from the audiences around me, it will probably be quite successful at the local box office. As a seasoned moviegoer who has experienced a fair share of zombie horror or comedy flicks, I do not like the movie enough, but I will not complain at all if its local box official success actually boosts the South Korean movie industry a bit at least.