Made in 2014, How to Save Us prefigures the last few years of our reality by being about Brian Everett (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his younger brother Sam (Coy Jandreau) during the middle of a mysterious quarantine. When Sam goes missing in Tasmania, Brian has to travel there to save his brother.

In the world of this movie, Tasmania is filled with the spirits of its many dead souls, so Brian must cover himself in the ashes of the dead to move amongst them. After his sister Molly (Tallay Wickham) asks him to search for their missing sibling, she givcs him Sam’s notebook, which has the title of this movie scrawled on the cover.

There are some big ideas here, with the entities being heard on the radio, Brian dealing with the loss of both of his parents and the fact that electricity can stop the dead, which means that a Nintendo Power Glove can become a weapon. Despite the addition of that nostalgic game gear, this movie has a darker edge than Trost’s The FP series.

When I got the chance to speak with Jason Trost, we discussed the end of the world that we’ve been living through. When discussing the actual pandemic, he said “You sit there and watch it outside and it’s like the laziest zombie apocalypse ever. (laughs) None of these movies really prepare you for it, because it was very tame in comparison to what we’ve watched. I think we’ve all been built up towards something and what we got wasn’t Mad Max.”

I really enjoyed the dark world that this movie shares and how it’s characters only speak through voiceover. It’s a way different film for Jason Trost and I enjoyed its challenges to the viewer.

You can watch this on Tubi.