Z for Zachariah

Z for Zachariah is a parable of postlapsarian loss. In a verdant valley miraculously saved from a nuclear apocalypse a young woman and her dog are joined first by a black engineer and then by a young white miner. Together they convert the girl’s father’s church into a water wheel that will use a radioactive waterfall to generate electricity. The wood from the church will help them rebuild human society. But the new world perpetuates the tensions of the old, including romantic emotions and racial tension.

The radioactive water points to mankind’s corruption of the source of life, the poisoning of purity. Indeed director Craig Zobel converts a survival novel into a religious drama by adding a character to the original two-person novel and developing the religious imagery. 

The title recalls a book that engineer John Loomis takes off a shelf: A is for Adam. The film dramatizes the end of that Biblical story, replaying the myth of Eden after the apocalypse. Zachariah is the prophet murdered between the temple and the altar, the last of the killed prophets, so the name embodies the new narrative as a whole.

The heroine Ann Burden carries the burden of innocence and faith when she struggles alone with her dog to survive. When she finds engineer John bathing in a radioactive pool she nurses him back to life. They develop a relationship of respect and interdependence. Drunk on beer, Loomis briefly confronts Ann with his vulgar carnality from which he retreats apologetic. 

Through the sacrament of wine Ann approaches John on her own terms and invites an intimate relationship. But John retreats, desiring her closeness but fearing the change that a sexual relationship would make. He’s inhibited by both their age and their colour difference. The scene in which Ann comes to him and he embraces her with a tender self-denial expresses the desire for a deep connection through the body but not carnal.

The serpent in Eden — added to the source novel — is young white Caleb, whose “Mr Loomis” is a condescending formality by which he insinuates himself between his two hosts. The scene in which Ann chooses Caleb over John begins with their excessive use of wine, non-sacramental, and another baptism parody when the three cavort in the water. John is finally moved to confess his love to Ann, but when she comes to him he’s drunk and unconscious. She surrenders her purity to Caleb instead, waiting when he comes out of the shower. This scene parallels her finding John under a waterfall and parodies their truer love scene, a literal purification parodying the authentic. 

Margot Robbie marvelously suggests her character’s transition from Innocence to Experience. After Caleb, her eyes are darker, more knowing, her carriage heavier under the burden of experience, and we know she cannot revert to her earlier self, nor to her earlier relationship. In the last scene she plays a dirge on the church organ while John sits earnestly listening, his hands clasped in prayer as if in futile hope to recover what he had with her pre-Caleb.  But you can’t recover a lost Eden. After sampling the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil innocence is gone. 

     One by one the male figures drop out of Ann’s life. We see less of her dog after John appears and nothing at all with the arrival of Caleb. Caleb — named after one of Moses’s advance spies who encouraged the invasion of Canaan — becomes the animal figure in Ann’s life despite his pretence at being her fellow-believer, in contrast to the agnostic John. After losing Ann John arranges for Caleb’s disappearance. But he can’t erase the change Caleb wrought upon Ann.