The writer-director Burr Steers came prepared for battle, if not much else, with appealing actors – Charles Dance, Jack Huston and an amusing Lena Headey – as well as handsome drawing rooms and impressive estates. But as one zombie brain after another is pulverized, and as Elizabeth and her crew slip through another close call, the story’s lone joke and its grinding literalness grow dull. It doesn’t help that Steers, as his occasional leering peeks up Elizabeth’s skirts underscore, clings to some old-fashioned ideas about women and their on-screen uses. The larger problem, though, is that each moment spent on this movie is another spent away from Austen’s novel.

Despite the film’s fairly brisk runtime, the story appears to get boring pretty quickly. Sure, there are some snappy moments and the fine period detailing are definite plus points. There are doses of humour too, but that’s really not enough to make this a satire, in which case it would have been better. And surprisingly enough, while zombie films ride on blood and guts galore, there simply isn’t enough gore in here to satisfy those who even like the zombie genre. So what we really have is a film that cannot be taken seriously either as a satire, as a period film and neither as a zombie film.