Dawn of the Dead

Ana, a nurse finishing a night shift, comes home to her suburban Milwaukee house and goes to sleep next to her husband. She wakes to find her neighbor girl — a child — standing in the bedroom doorway. The child has been bitten. Before Ana can process it, the girl attacks and kills her husband, who reanimates almost immediately. Ana flees in her car as the neighborhood descends into chaos around her, the city already burning in the distance.

She's picked up by a cop named Kenneth and two other survivors, and the group fights their way to the Crossroads Mall — a large, empty shopping center that seems defensible. Inside they find a small group already sheltering: a salesman, a couple, a pregnant woman, and two security guards who initially hold them at gunpoint. After tense negotiations, they settle into an uneasy coexistence, boarding up the entrances and surveying what they have.

Life in the mall develops a dark routine. The group watches from the rooftop as the parking lot fills with the undead, communicating by whiteboard with a gun shop owner named Andy who is stranded across the street. They lower supplies to him by zip line; he picks off zombies that resemble celebrities. The tone is grimly comic — the mall offers everything except an exit.

The situation fractures when more survivors arrive, including a man hiding the fact that his wife has been bitten. She gives birth; the baby is born infected. The group executes the infant and the infected woman's husband is devastated. A plan to reach the marina and escape by boat takes shape — they will modify two shuttle buses with steel plating and drive through the horde to reach Andy's store, then the waterfront.

The escape attempt is brutal. They fight through the packed parking lot, losing people along the way. Andy has turned by the time they reach him. They make it to the marina, get on the boats, and push out onto the water — battered, reduced, but moving. The film ends with handheld footage on a Caribbean island that was supposed to be safe. It isn't. The footage cuts out.