Samrat Chakrabarti, George Basil, Kiran Deol, Katie McCuen and Vishal Vijayakumar attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Didn’t Die” at the Library Center Theatre on January 28, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Michael Hurcomb/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
“Meera didn’t even tell me this was a zombie movie,” Kiran Deol says. “What the fuck!”
“I did, Kiran,” Meera Menon insists.
“You said this was Before Sunrise,” Deol counters, to loud audience laughter. The Library Center Theatre is full for this January 28 post-premiere Q&A of Didn’t Die, Menon’s zombie apocalypse film, screening in the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
“I did tell you to watch Before Sunrise,” Menon admits, now laughing with the rest of the room.
Didn’t Die focuses on Vinita (Deol), who we meet hosting the 100th episode of a one-woman podcast show of hopeful local updates, airing on the radio during the dark days of a world riddled with undead half-decomposed zombies. Called “biters,” they only come out at night to hunt on living people, but now they’re being spotted in the daytime — a terrifying development for those who are survivors of the mysterious outbreak. Banding together with her brothers, Hari (Samrat Chakrabarti) and the younger Rish (Vishal Vijayakumar), Hari’s eccentric wife, Barbara (Katie McCuen), and reluctantly accepting her serial-cheater ex, Vincent (George Basil), who shows up with a baby he found abandoned, Vinita and her tribe must do what they can to survive, not just physically, but emotionally, as death threatens to bite down on any one of them.
“We were all in our own movie,” Deol deadpans, standing on stage alongside her costars, Menon, and Menon’s life partner and co-writer, Paul Gleason. “I do stand-up, and in stand-up you fail a lot, publicly. What was very cool about this process — because it was so many friends and the set was so small — you got to do a lot of that on set and it was okay if it didn’t work. And that gives you a lot of space, I think, to succeed because there’s the freedom to fail.”
Told to bring their own costumes, Menon says she “harassed” her cast members to join the project before even writing the script, telling the audience that much of the film was improvised as a collaborative work.
“Podcasts [are] such a longform thing, it’s like an hour, hour-and-a-half if you really listen to them. Few of them are structured very well, and most of them are just lots of rambling. Shout out Joe Rogan!” Deol adds, to loud laughs from the crowd. “And so we, you know, I guess just did a similar thing.”
With echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic — staying inside, stocking up on supplies, keeping your circle small, and being suspicious of outsiders — the black-and-white footage turns that history into a nostalgic nightmare of what our worst fears had been. “The movie is really about how beauty can grow from tragedy,” Menon says. But it’s not an easy journey to move past the grief of coping with what’s been lost; Vinita and her gang are staying in her childhood home, and we’re treated to interwoven “home movie” footage of the South Asian American siblings growing up with their now-gone parents. As Vinita says in the film, “I do wonder if anyone that I used to know ‘made it.’ That used to mean being famous — but now it just means being here.”
From the beginning, Menon (who has previous zombie experience as director on an episode of The Walking Dead) knew that she wanted to have Deol and a zombie apocalypse in the film. The podcast was always part of the premise and, for Deol’s improvisation, it acted as a shield for Vinita to block out what was going on in the crumbling world around her. “I know her superpower is holding a microphone,” Menon says of casting Deol to be the podcast host.
Menon was right: Deol really is in her element with a microphone in one hand and an audience before her ready to break into laughter.
“I still can’t believe it was a zombie movie,” Deol says.
