“I don’t want to be here without you,” teen Sloane (Olivia Holt) tells her older sister Lily (Joelle Farrow), in what is chronologically one of the first scenes in writer/director Adam MacDonald’s This Is Not a Test. Sloane knows that Lily, now graduated from their high school in small-town Cortege, will soon fly the coop, leaving the younger Sloane, who is not yet legally old enough to live on her own, in the home of their bullying, abusive father (Jeff Roop). With their mother long gone, Sloane clings to Lily for nurturing and love, and her words come with an existential urgency – not least because the film, adapted from Courtney Summers’ 2012 young adult novel of the same name, opened with a later scene in which Sloane sat in a bath with a suicide note, fully intending to kill herself before her actions were interrupted. Without Lily, and with nothing to shield her from her father’s controlling, violent impulses, Sloane really doesn’t want to be here anymore.
The teen years both are and are not a test. For while adolescents are always facing trials and pushing boundaries, what they are going through is merely a dry run for adulthood. This is the test phase for first experiences: falling in love, shouldering responsibility, encountering mortality. It is the time when childish things are gradually put away, or at least replaced by more serious items with higher stakes. For teenagers are figuring out who they are, what they like, and what kind of person they want to be, all while confronting the drives of their own hormones and the ramifications of profound change.
“Things will change, I promise you,” Lily had told Sloane before leaving – and as tends to happen to those coming of age, things do change, fast, as young high schooler Sloan, contemplating her own death, is suddenly faced with the overnight destruction of her whole world, and the need to forge new relationships and to adapt to unfolding circumstances, if indeed she means to go on living.
This Is Not a Test is a zombie film, initially following the model of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake (2024) with its fast-moving undead and its initial, chaotic outbreak seen in suburbia. When, in the pandemonium, Sloane joins forces with kindly, guilt-ridden Rhys (Froy Gutierrez), wannabe leader Cary (Corteon Moore), bereft twins Trace (Carson MacCormac) and Grace (Chloe Avakian), and the twins’ mother (Krista Bridges) – with only the novel’s young Harrison absent here – the fugitive survivors take shelter not in a Romero-esque shopping mall but in their now abandoned high school, that locus of teen rites of passage under (peer) pressure. Here the zombies, though a constant danger, recede invisibly into the distance, while the co-ed characters do what adolescents always do in such an educational setting: squabble and bicker, form tentative cliques and alliances, jockey for power (and adolescent empowerment), use this relatively safe space to work through uncertain feelings and domestic traumas, hook up in different configurations, and collectively close ranks against adults – here embodied by their English teacher Mr Baxter (Luke MacFarlane) – no less than against any other threat moving in from the outside of their little microcosm.
At the centre of all this is Sloane, already struggling to see a reason to live even before the world turned into a place of mindless biting aggression, and enduring her own personal apocalypse. Yet after her sojourn at the school, and the new bonds that she builds there, she is now ready to face her fears and anxieties – not to mention her sense of abandonment – head-on. And to do that, she must return to the source of all her problems – her home – before she can have any hope of moving on, leaving her childhood forever behind and once more embracing life and love. So like his earlier Pyewacket (2017), MacDonald’s This Is Not a Test exposes teen angst to the elements of genre, allegorising the instability, alienation and indeed horror of adolescence itself.
strap: Adam MacDonald’s young adult adaptation sees high schoolers beleaguered by apocalypse – and by their own adolescent angst
© Anton Bitel
