Seth Grahame-Smith’s riff on Austen’s famous opening sentence in his 2009 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains’ –  adds an element of repetition to Austen’s prose that also haunts the film adaptation of his mash-up ‘best seller’. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies presents the viewer with a catalogue of zombie transformations and annihilations: beautiful young women dressed in fashionable virginal white glut themselves on their latest victims; innumerable zombies march en masse to threaten the band of protagonists; the air rings with the sounds of swords drawn and plunged quickly into zombie flesh; and the swift blast of a musket shot decapitates the undead with a speed that will certainly make the average viewer jump in their seat. Such shock pieces are all enjoyable, and part of a recognisable tradition of zombie horror on film, yet once the film has put each to work, it has little more to offer than more once-beautiful zombie girls, more decapitations, and more sword-wielding and musket-firing.

Those familiar with the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, ‘by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’, will know that Austen deserves to retain her priority position in the authorship pairing. The film, like the mash-up novel, stays close to Austen’s original cast of characters, as well as her shifts in location and theatrical dialogue, but with a major alteration: the courtship quests of Jane and Bingley and Elizabeth and Darcy take place in a rural Hertfordshire suffering from the breakout of a mass zombie plague, resulting in a number of challenges to personal and public safety. The five Bennet sisters are still looking for husbands, but have undergone extensive training in the martial arts in China, and from the very beginning of the film their skills as warriors are placed centre stage. All are carefully polishing their guns when Mrs Bennet excitedly announces the arrival of the Bingleys at Netherfield Hall.

One of the film’s most successful scenes, for the way that it combines Regency manners and modern martial arts, is Darcy’s (Sam Riley) proposal to Elizabeth (Lily James) which takes place at Rosings’ Parsonage, the residence of the newly married Mr Collins (Matt Smith) and Charlotte Lucas (Aisling Loftus). Grahame-Smith sets Lizzie and Darcy’s sharp verbal repartee – lifted largely verbatim from Austen – against a succession of physical kicks and carefully choreographed exchanges with a fire poker, and the battle is realised impressively by James and Riley on screen: both convey a mesmerising mixture of aggression and attraction through their physical and verbal digs. The combative nature of Elizabeth’s replies and her offence at Darcy’s condescension are thrown into sharper relief by the addition of physical violence and throughout James conveys a firmness and strength which seems consistent with Elizabeth’s original characterisation. Even here, though, some of the film’s additions to Grahame-Smith’s fight script in the novel seem rather worn: when Darcy’s dagger slices the buttons from the top of Elizabeth’s gown to expose her heaving bosom, the move is more tediously familiar than titillating.

The film also shies away from bringing the zombie threat too near. In Grahame-Smith’s text, Charlotte’s willingness to marry the odious Mr Collins is partly explained by her confession to Elizabeth that she has been ‘stricken’ by the zombie plague and therefore will not have to suffer his offensive charms for very long: ‘“All I ask is that my final months be happy ones, and that I be permitted a husband who will see to my proper Christian beheading and burial”’, she tells Lizzie. In its refusal to make Charlotte a zombie, the film actually seems to do without Grahame-Smith altogether, returning instead to the implied action of Austen’s original novel. The new Mrs Collins will presumably live out a long life alternating between frequent humbling visits to Lady Catherine at Rosings Park and the sanctuary of her secluded backwards-facing parlour.

This raises an obvious question: how much of the film’s entertainment derives from Austen’s novel and how much from Grahame-Smith’s zombie framework? Given that Austen’s original dialogue elicited many of the laughs in the cinema in the viewing I attended, it’s clear that the cast deliver the lines from her most ‘light, and bright, and sparkling’ novel with much success. In a film certainly not short on weapons – muskets, daggers, pistols, and cannons abound – Austen’s dialogue remains the strongest arsenal, as her irony lifts the humour above the surface comedy provided by the zombie hordes. Matt Smith’s Mr Collins is a delight to watch for similar reasons, as his performance combines the best of skilful physical comedy with an astute delivery of Austen’s speeches. Smith’s Collins performs ridiculous dance moves at the Netherfield ball and utters anachronistic profanities which are entertaining additions to his characterisation on the page (and seem pleasingly appropriate), but he is still at his most hilarious when delivering his earnest proposal to Elizabeth, fawning over Lady Catherine, or asserting his misplaced authority over the Bennet women, for which in all cases he is largely, if not wholly, reliant on Austen’s dialogue. These scenes, where zombies are far from view, are some of the strongest in the film.

The film proper is prefaced by an opening sequence that sets out the history of how the zombie-causing ‘Black Plague’ came about, told via a series of detailed cartoons of townsfolk suffering from warts, boils, and sickness that pop up in succession for the viewer and produce an effect akin to looking into a children’s toy theatre. Unusually for an Austen adaptation, this sets the film – and by implication Pride and Prejudice – in a context reminiscent of Regency caricature, with its penchant for exaggerations of scale and frequent use of the base functions of the human body for mockery, and brings to mind the more political and subversive qualities of Austen’s social commentary that have characterised Austen criticism in recent years. For all its outright silliness, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies may have something in common with Patricia Rozema’s experimental Mansfield Park (1999): while that film elevated the presence of the slave trade through visual representations that reach beyond Austen’s textual traces, by bringing real battles to the plot of Pride and Prejudice, Steers’s film might also encourage viewers to more readily confront the setting of the original novel in a time of war, as well as recognise Austen’s broader involvement with what Marilyn Butler memorably termed the revolutionary ‘war of ideas’.

Yet this may be going too far, as the film stubbornly refuses to take itself seriously. About two-thirds of the way into the action we are treated to a deliberately stagey and disconnected shot of Darcy diving manfully into a lake, dressed in the appropriate attire of a loose-fitting white shirt. Entirely unconnected to the zombie action that surrounds it, the re-enactment of Colin Firth’s descent into the lake at Pemberley in Andrew Davies’s landmark 1995 BBC adaptation comments knowingly upon a longstanding desire to introduce new material into Austen’s original novel. The film knows that its viewers will find the BBC allusion just as familiar as Austen’s opening sentence or Darcy’s declaration of love, and seems already embedded in a tradition of Austen adaptations for the screen in other ways too. Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) capitalised on the success of the BBC Pride and Prejudice in casting Colin Firth as the lawyer Mark Darcy, and it’s tempting to make similar forward connections for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Sally Phillips, who played Bridget’s foul-mouthed friend Shazzer in the film version of Fielding’s novel, here takes up the role of Mrs Bennet. When it appeared in 2009, the back jacket of Grahame-Smith’s novel claimed to transform ‘a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read’, but with its familiar nod to earlier adaptations and its tendency to return to Austen’s original novel in places, the film of the book seems to know its audience better, and know that all the best lines are Austen’s.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was released in UK cinemas on 11 February 2016 and will be available on DVD and Blu-Ray in June 2016.