I’m not sure how to feel about My Apocalyptic Thanksgiving. I suspect it is meant to be a feel-good drama, but the tone is all over the map and the story has some improbable twists and turns.

Marcus (Joshua Warren Bush) is a special needs adult living in a group home. His, and the other residents’, favorite television show is Apocalyptic Zombies, a seemingly campy, low-budget version of The Walking Dead centered around a mother and daughter. The first ten minutes of the film has more Apocalyptic Zombies than main story. There feels like a missed opportunity here, as Marcus goes off his meds and begins to hallucinate zombies. The film could have explored how pop culture, and in particular the television shows and movies we love, shapes our understanding of the real world and how we interpret reality based on art and narratives. That’s my personal tangent, though.

The rest of the story centers around Marcus seeking a sense of family, as he was abandoned by his mother as a child. He becomes involved with the Park family, helping father Jung (Ray Chang) at the laundromat they own and operate. There is tension with mother Me Young (Grace Shen) and son Kim (Chris Wu), the former not liking or trusting Marcus and the latter, on parole, that his father likes Marcus more than he does him. Marcus also seeks out his birth mother and becomes involved in a local gang, inadvertently serving as muscle, among other things.

My Apocalyptic Thanksgiving continually intercuts between the actual narrative and the Apocalyptic Zombies series, which is about to end its television run. The plot is both convoluted and forced, as all of Marcus’ various threads overlap. The film genuinely seeks to portray its main character both sympathetically and as a complex, nuanced character, and kudos to Bush, who imbues Marcus with an ease and sincerity that works for the character.

The other performers also try, but it doesn’t quite work, not least of which due to the fact that it ends up feeling like an afterschool special. Perhaps the title is the best example: it references the television show-within-the-film, and also seeks to describe a film set at Thanksgiving in which a special needs man experiences a series of life-changing events. But there is nothing apocalyptic, in any sense of the word, about the film.

My Apocalyptic Thanksgiving doesn’t know what it wants to be, or it wants to be everything to everyone and as a result doesn’t quite measure up in any area. It throws a half dozen plots at the wall and hopes it all sticks, but it’s overlong at an hour and forty-three minutes. There’s a better, shorter film hiding within this one. Despite the presence of the zombie show, this is in no way a horror film, and, as noted above, provides no comment on horror culture.

5 out of 10