I remembered the man in the wetsuit, the red motorbike and the cat more clearly than I remembered the intricacies of the plot. That seemed as good a reason as any to rewatch Apocalipsis Z: El principio del fin (2024) before getting into Apocalipsis Z: Nuevo Mundo (2026). I had liked the first film when it appeared on Prime Video, but two years and a frankly unreasonable number of other zombie films later, I wanted to find out whether it still held up.
It did. In fact, watching them together made the distinction between the two films considerably more obvious. The first is about a grieving man discovering how quickly his own small world can be taken away; the second wants to show what remains of an entire country, with its government on the Canary Islands, civilians under military authority and soldiers sent back into Madrid for supplies. I enjoyed both, but the more elaborate the sequel became, the more I missed the intimacy of the original.
The end of the world was more interesting when it was just outside the front door
Manel, played by Francisco Ortiz, is not an obvious candidate for surviving a national disaster. He is a lawyer in Galicia, still hollowed out by the death of his wife Julia, and his life has already shrunk to a few familiar rooms and the company of his cat, Lúculo. His sister Belén remains one of the few connections he has to the outside world, but even before the infection spreads it is clear that he hasn’t exactly been rushing to rejoin the living.
The first stages of the TSJ outbreak arrive in the background: worrying reports, changing instructions, restrictions and the creeping awareness that the people in charge may no longer know what they are dealing with. Having lived through COVID-19, I found the language of the emergency familiar in ways the filmmakers could scarcely have avoided, although the real pandemic was nothing like this fictional disease. Where other zombie films are anxious to show civilisation being destroyed in a single expensive montage, this one allows ordinary routines to fray before they finally snap.
The early domestic scenes give the film a useful sense of scale. Food, water, electricity and the ability to trust a neighbour suddenly become serious concerns, and remaining in a familiar house isn’t automatically a guarantee of safety. What I liked was that the film understands how frightening a crisis can be before anything spectacular happens; sometimes all it takes is the knowledge that you may have to open your front door sooner than you would prefer.
A wetsuit, a speargun and a rather annoyed cat
Eventually Manel has to leave the house, and his protective equipment is one of my favourite things about the film. A wetsuit, reinforced with whatever he can find, is not particularly fashionable apocalypse clothing, but it makes a certain practical sense when a bite could end everything. He uses a speargun and travels by motorbike rather than immediately discovering some implausible natural talent for military tactics.
Then there is Lúculo. In a genre where animals are often used as quick emotional leverage, the cat is part of Manel’s everyday decision-making rather than a decorative companion. He has to carry food and supplies for two, make arrangements for the animal’s safety and accept that the most sensible decision for his own survival may not always be the one he is prepared to take. That little bit of stubborn responsibility makes him far easier to care about.
I’ve watched enough disaster films to know that the characters who seem best prepared are often the first ones to do something spectacularly foolish. Manel works because he is neither an action hero nor a complete idiot; he is an ordinary person gradually becoming more resourceful as his options disappear. The narrative keeps returning to that tension between what he ought to do and what he can actually bring himself to do, which is far more persuasive than another character delivering a speech about the fate of mankind.
The infected are terrifying, but people are still the problem
Once Manel reaches the coast, the danger shifts from infected strangers to perfectly healthy ones. His encounter with Ushakov’s armed group, and with Viktor Pritchenko, played by José María Yazpik, gives the film its first real examination of what happens when the old rules disappear. The sailors have weapons and access to a boat, which makes them useful people to know in the short term, but their exploitation of other survivors is a reminder that power rarely makes people more decent by itself.
Pritchenko is an effective supporting character because his pragmatism doesn’t immediately reveal whether he can be trusted. He understands the new world far better than Manel, but he also knows when to look after his own interests, and the uncertainty makes him interesting. It is a more grounded form of suspense than watching someone fail to notice an infected creature standing directly behind them, and I appreciated the change of emphasis.
The hospital section develops the moral stakes further. There Manel encounters Lucía, played by Berta Vázquez, a nurse trying to keep a small group alive, alongside Sister Cecilia and three children. It is no longer enough for Manel to get himself and the cat to safety; the circumstances have put other people in front of him, and walking away would be a decision he would have to live with.
Lucía is one of the original film’s strongest additions because she is capable without being implausibly invulnerable. The hospital’s dwindling resources, the makeshift routines and Sister Cecilia’s eventual sacrifice all reinforce how much effort goes into preserving ordinary humanity when there is very little ordinary life left. There are moments of violence, certainly, but the quieter gestures linger longer than the gunfire.
The helicopter is an escape, not a happy ending
The original’s final stretch brings the various strands together as the survivors try to reach a helicopter and make for the Canary Islands. The struggle with Ushakov’s group turns violent, and Manel has to act decisively to protect people who, a little earlier, would have been strangers to him. It is an effective resolution to his personal journey precisely because his goal has changed: merely staying alive is no longer enough.
Of course, the film doesn’t allow that change of heart to translate into a neat ending for the world. As Pritchenko flies them towards their supposed refuge, Belén’s warning over the radio and the appearance of fighter aircraft raise the possibility that the islands may be just as dangerous as the mainland. I liked that uncertainty because it makes the rescue feel provisional, and it expands the story only after we’ve had time to become invested in one person’s attempt to survive.
The Canary Islands: Europe’s last refuge, more or less
Nuevo Mundo picks up in a changed Spain. The Canary Islands have become a centre of surviving government and military authority, but the word ‘refuge’ begins to sound rather optimistic once we see how crowded and tightly controlled life has become. Supplies are running low, emergency measures have become normal practice, and civilians are being pressed into a military system that is hardly designed to give them many appealing choices.
The sequel’s protagonist, Roberto, played by Carlos Alcaide, is a deliberate contrast with Manel. He is more openly opportunistic, willing to steal or trade his way through difficulty, and not particularly concerned with being liked. Pritchenko remains connected to the black market, and Roberto’s own troubles with military discipline help push him into a dangerous supply mission to Madrid, while his questions about his father provide a more private reason for going.
I can see the dramatic logic in changing protagonists. An established survivor like Manel might have offered more continuity, but Roberto allows the story to look at a different social class and a less straightforward set of loyalties. All the same, I found Manel easier to follow, partly because the first film allowed his character to develop in the spaces between emergencies; Roberto is competing with a much bigger cast and a constantly moving operation.
A supply run to Madrid is nobody’s idea of a quiet assignment
The mission into Madrid is the sequel’s central engine, and it makes the new direction clear almost immediately. The team moves through territory occupied by huge numbers of infected, including the danger around the Cuatro Vientos airfield, and the operation quickly unravels into a series of retreats, improvised decisions and confrontations. De Luna’s sacrifice gives the danger some immediate weight, but the structure has become noticeably closer to military action cinema than to the personal survival story of the first film.
Fast infected remain a particularly nasty proposition. A shambling zombie at least offers the possibility of getting away if you notice it early enough; the creatures in these films have none of that courtesy, and the sequel puts their speed to work in larger spaces with more performers and considerably more noise. I enjoyed the mass movement and the choreography, even when I began to feel that every confrontation had to top the previous one.
The spectacle is impressive on its own terms, but spectacle changes the way an audience watches a film. In the original I worried about Manel getting a door closed in time or finding enough supplies to continue; here I find myself evaluating fields of fire, barricades and the odds of a military evacuation. Both approaches belong in the zombie genre, yet they produce different kinds of engagement, and my preference remains firmly with the smaller one.
Marina, Castro and the weight of other people’s decisions
The team is more than a collection of armed silhouettes, although I would have liked longer with several of its members. Marina, played by Julia Martínez, gives the mission an emotional dimension through the people she hopes to find and the losses she has to confront. One small moment, in which Roberto helps her improvise a memorial, struck me as more affecting than some of the much larger action scenes because it allowed the characters to acknowledge grief rather than keep sprinting away from it.
Castro, played by Mónica López, carries the uncomfortable responsibility of command, balancing the team’s survival against orders and scarce resources. Tamara Casellas as Comillas and Santiago Vaca Narvaja as Core help create the sense of a unit with different temperaments and instincts, while the returning Pritchenko and Lucía maintain a connection with the original film. The trouble is that the film’s speed sometimes leaves them looking like people waiting for the next plot instruction rather than characters with time to become fully established.
I did appreciate Roberto gradually discovering that his own safety can’t be the only consideration. It is a familiar moral progression, but not an unwelcome one in a story about the social cost of catastrophe. The film is most effective when this shift happens through small acts of generosity, because grand redemptive gestures tend to feel rather less convincing when an enormous horde and a helicopter arrive at precisely the right moment.
Government by emergency decree
One genuinely interesting aspect of Nuevo Mundo is its attempt to imagine what happens after the dramatic collapse, when a government is still present but increasingly unable to provide the protections that make its authority legitimate. The islands are not a restored country; they are a crowded and increasingly unequal place trying to stretch limited resources across a population that has nowhere else to go. Conscription, rationing and military control all make a terrible sort of sense, but none of them eliminates the question of who gets to decide what survival requires.
González Escalona, played by Javier Godino, introduces another layer of political calculation. His ambitions and the mysteries surrounding Roberto’s father suggest that some people continue to think in terms of influence and advantage, even while the rest of the country has become largely uninhabitable. I liked the ambition of this material, although the film never has quite enough space to make its political questions as compelling as its monster attacks.
Perhaps that is the sequel’s defining difficulty. It wants to be a film about the moral character of a surviving society and also a very energetic film about soldiers being chased through Madrid. The two ideas aren’t incompatible, but they require room to develop, and I occasionally felt that the story was hurrying between them for fear that the audience might grow restless.
A bullring, a drone and too many infected to count
The climactic bullring operation is where the sequel most enthusiastically embraces its larger ambitions. The team learns that civilians remain trapped in the structure, and what began as a mission to recover supplies becomes a question of whether the soldiers are willing to risk the resources and people they still have. Marina wants to help; Castro initially has to consider the limitations of her orders; and Roberto faces a choice between the information he wants about his father and the lives of the people directly in front of him.
I rather liked the plan to distract the infected with a drone carrying a music player. It’s a slightly improbable contraption, perhaps, but its practical ingenuity reminded me of Manel’s improvisations in the first film. The scene that follows is considerably less restrained, with gunfire, desperate movement and an increasingly fragile escape route, before Pritchenko’s helicopter helps turn what could have been a massacre into a rescue.
The conclusion gives Roberto a recognisably heroic decision and allows Castro to invite other survivors to gather for evacuation. It is satisfying enough as an action-film ending, but it is also more conventional than the original’s ominous radio warning. When I think back to both films, I find the unsettling prospect of an unsafe refuge more interesting than the spectacle of another successful military extraction.
Making a bigger apocalypse without a Hollywood budget
Both films are directed by Carles Torrens and written by Ángel Agudo, drawing on the fictional world created by the Galician novelist Manel Loureiro. The first film’s locations and modest viewpoint make familiar domestic spaces and ordinary roads feel dangerous; the sequel expands into garrisons, aircraft, military checkpoints and streets filled with infected. It is a noticeable design evolution, but one dictated by the screenplay as much as by money.
The second film was produced by Nostromo Pictures, with Núria Valls and Adrián Guerra as executive producers, and filmed in 2025 in locations including Catalonia and the Canary Islands. Some Barcelona locations stand in for Madrid, while the production relies on practical performers, stunts, fire effects and carefully staged crowds as well as digital assistance. In reporting on the production, the filmmakers describe demanding days involving hundreds of people, several cameras and large action set-ups; actor Carlos Alcaide has also spoken about being chased by a crowd of roughly 200 costumed infected during filming.
That effort shows on screen. I was impressed by how convincingly the second film creates a country operating on the last of its resources, and by the physical weight of the largest crowd scenes. Still, production value is not quite the same thing as dramatic impact, and I found that the original’s smaller environments created tension more economically because they left less room for its characters to escape.
From a blog diary to a franchise
The series has an origin that appeals to the part of me that still remembers a less centralised internet. Manel Loureiro’s story began as an online serial or blog before becoming the novel Apocalipsis Z: El principio del fin, published in 2008, and was followed by Los días oscuros and La ira de los justos. A personal account of the end of the world feels particularly well suited to that form, when a reader could follow one person’s daily experiences and gradually realise how much the situation was deteriorating.
The first film retains something of that diary-like quality, even without constantly showing a diary. The sequel draws on the wider literary universe rather than simply reproducing the books scene for scene, and it takes the opportunity to change the viewpoint completely. That makes the series potentially open-ended, but it also means the filmmakers need to keep finding reasons to care about individual people, not simply fresh locations in which to stage increasingly expensive outbreaks.
According to Amazon’s official production information, the sequel arrived on Prime Video on 30 October 2026 after a Sitges screening. That gives these films a fairly unusual trajectory, from an internet-born Spanish zombie tale to a globally distributed streaming franchise. It’s a pleasing bit of media history, and a reminder that modest beginnings can sometimes survive a remarkable amount of expansion.
The sound of the world going wrong
Sound matters in the first film because Manel is frequently by himself. A distant disturbance, the absence of familiar noise or an unexpected movement beyond a closed door can do more work than another barrage of musical insistence, and Federico Jusid’s score supports the original’s movement from uneasy normality to open danger. The soundtrack gives space to a frightened person listening to a world he no longer understands.
The sequel, inevitably, has a different sonic identity: radio chatter, gunfire, helicopters, engines and the collective movement of the infected occupy much more of its attention. I didn’t dislike that, and the bullring’s use of a music player gives sound a literal role in the characters’ survival. Even so, the contrast is revealing: one film makes you listen for what may be outside, while the other makes it almost impossible to hear anything else.
The familiar comfort of the end of everything
I’ve been watching zombie films long enough to know that there is not much left in the genre that can be called entirely new. From Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead to 28 Days Later, Resident Evil and The Walking Dead, the familiar cycle repeats: the institutions fail, survivors form uneasy alliances, and somebody eventually proves that being alive is no guarantee of being civilised. The infected have become faster over the decades, and the scale of the destruction has grown, but the human questions remain remarkably similar.
That may be why I still find the small details more compelling than the grand spectacle. I want to know how someone manages a dangerous journey with an animal, how a group divides the last of its supplies, or whether a stranger can be trusted with a locked door. The genre tends to remember its humanity when it makes room for these problems, rather than treating them as interruptions before the next fight.
The first Apocalipsis Z gave me more of that everyday unease. The sequel’s political setting is promising, and I would happily watch another chapter that explored how ordinary people live under the surviving government. What I’d rather not see is every new instalment deciding it must be twice as loud simply because the previous one already had plenty of infected.
More zombies, less room to breathe
I don’t think Nuevo Mundo is a bad film. Its expanded action scenes are convincing, the military setting offers a different perspective on the outbreak, and there are genuinely worthwhile ideas about power, grief and self-interest in a society hanging on by its fingernails. The larger cast also gives the franchise room to move beyond Manel, even if not every new character makes the impression I would have liked.
But I still prefer El principio del fin, and the rewatch only strengthened that opinion. It is the more intimate, atmospheric film, and I cared more about Manel and his improvised attempts to survive than I did about the larger operation in Madrid. Both are enjoyable ways to spend an evening if you’re in the mood for a Spanish zombie apocalypse, but the first understands something that sequels often forget: the world doesn’t have to look enormous for its end to feel personal.
After all the ammunition, the soldiers, the helicopters and the crowds of infected, I keep returning to the image of a bloke on a motorbike with a cat to look after. Perhaps that’s enough of an apocalypse for me.
My ratings: Apocalipsis Z: El principio del fin (2024) — 4/5. Apocalipsis Z: Nuevo Mundo (2026) — 3.5/5.
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