The Domestics

In a post apocalyptic future, husband and wife Mark and Nina West (Tyler Hoechlin and Kate Bosworth) must fight their way through marauding gangs to save Nina’s parents – but will they get there in time?

’…feels as if it has arrived to the dystopian party too late'

Set in a future where blood-thirsty tribes control the highways, Director Mike P. Nelson’s survival-against-the-odds movie feels as if it has arrived to the dystopian party too late. Borrowing heavily from the genre-defining ‘Mad Max’ and doom-laden ’The Road’, this is a drama that operates in a destroyed world that seems instantly all-too-familiar. 

Carrying neither intrigue or insight as it moves towards its destination, each attack presents a different kind of marauder as if to distract from the hollowness of its lead characters. Sadly neither Tyler Hoechlin and Kate Bosworth  can convince as dysfunctional married couple Mark and Nina. Trapped inside a creaking plot where they are the unwitting pilots, their journeys bring us to a third act which starts to improve with arrival of a scene-stealing Betsy (Sonoya Mizuno). However she is soon tossed aside in preference for a damp ending that strains for any interest at all.

Made watchable only by its fast parade of scenes and varying antagonists, ‘The Domestics’ is a violent, land-of-free ‘B’ movie which arrives, already paled in the sunlight of ‘The Walking Dead’ and others. With its vapid lead characters and tired plagiarisations, this is one horror-move riff that has gone out of tune well before its first lead bar has met an assailant.