Movie Musings: This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

This Is Not a Test is the rare adaptation that understands the assignment so completely it almost feels like the book found a new language instead of being translated. Rather than sanding down Courtney Summers’ sharp edges, the film leans into them; into the quiet dread, the emotional paralysis, and the suffocating sense that survival itself might not be the point. It doesn’t try to fix Sloane or make her palatable. It simply lets her exist, suspended between wanting to live and wanting to disappear, which is exactly what made the book unforgettable.

What makes the movie remarkable is its refusal to pretend the apocalypse changes who these characters are. They remain teenagers, petty, scared, impulsive, hopeful in flashes, and then immediately crushed by the reality that the future they were promised has quietly vanished. The film honors that emotional truth with almost reverent care, capturing the book’s core idea that the zombies aren’t the real horror. The absence of a future is. How apt for the moment we are in, 14 years after the story originally entered the world.

And yet, make no mistake. This is still zombie horror in its purest form. The dread here is relentless. It hangs in the silences, in the long stretches where nothing happens and everything could. When violence erupts, it feels sudden, ugly, and deeply personal. The infected aren’t spectacle. They are symptoms, reminders that the world has ended and kept going anyway. I appreciate that the movie did not rely on jump scares (though it is not absent of them, either!).

Most importantly, the film feels unmistakably like Courtney Summers. Not just in plot, but in atmosphere. It understands how trauma reshapes perception, how hope can feel like a betrayal, and how survival is not always triumphant. It preserves the book’s emotional core while allowing cinema to do what prose cannot. It lets us sit inside Sloane’s stillness, her numbness, her reluctant, fragile movement toward something like possibility.

This Is Not a Test doesn’t just adapt the novel. It protects it. It understands that zombie horror was never about the zombies. It was always about the unbearable weight of being alive when you’re not sure you want to be. And in that space, the film doesn’t just succeed. It lingers. Like the neighbor or your teacher or your…..well, you get the point.

This is Not a Test (the movie) and This is Not a Test (Courtney’s Version) are out now! Check out our review of the updated edition here!