"Worldbreaker": A Gray Apocalypse That Forgets to Live

Brad Anderson is still living off the reputation of “The Machinist*”, a film so severe and committed that it suggested a filmmaker with a taste for risk. Two decades later, “Worldbreaker” makes it painfully clear how far that promise has faded. Quietly released into the rental market, the film feels less like a launch and more like an abandonment.

This film is nominally a post-apocalyptic science-fiction story, although it barely earns either label. Earth has been devastated by interdimensional creatures called “breakers”—insect-like monsters that resemble those from *Starship Troopers*. If they injure you, you become a hybrid: part human, part predator. This premise is intriguing, yet the film does absolutely nothing interesting with it.

The story follows Willa (Billie Boullet), a teenager surviving in a world locked in perpetual gloom. She lives with her parents: a wounded father (Luke Evans) who limps about with a cane and fills the silence with endless stories about a legendary hero named Kodiak, and a mother (Milla Jovovich) who serves as a soldier. The film never justifies why all the soldiers are women.

Early on, a breaker attack separates the family. The mother marches off to war, while Willa and her father escape to a bleak, empty island and settle into an abandoned cottage. From that point on, the film comes to a halt. Days blend as they farm, chop wood, and practice sword fighting, as if swords are the preferred weapon of the apocalypse.

A year later, Willa meets another girl, Rose (Mila Harris), who lives alone in a seaside cave. This should introduce tension or danger, but it does not. The film hints at hybrids, discovery, and betrayal, but never commits to any of these themes. Instead, it sinks deeper into repetitive scenes of quiet misery.

The pacing is punishing. After a brief burst of monster activity at the start, the movie becomes an endurance test. Characters stare at old picture books and ponder animals and flowers from the past, as if nostalgia alone constitutes drama. The Kodiak myth is repeated so often that it becomes more of an irritation than a mystery. When the film finally reaches a supposed revelation in the third act, it lands with no impact whatsoever—it’s obvious long before the film believes it is.

Jovovich appears just enough to remind us how underutilized she is here. She has presence, as always, but is sidelined by a story that doesn’t know what to do with any of its characters.

From a technical standpoint, “Worldbreaker” is passable. The cinematography is competently bleak, the effects are serviceable, and the performances are sincere. However, none of that rescues a film this empty. It’s dull, repetitive, and lacking in dramatic tension, mistaking gray skies and silence for meaning.

In the end, “Worldbreaker” doesn’t feel unfinished so much as unmotivated. It lingers, it drags, and it never justifies its existence. Like the world it depicts, it’s exhausted, drained of color, and utterly devoid of urgency—a film that collapses under the weight of its own boredom.

Final Grade: D+

"Worldbreaker" is in theaters now.