Last Updated on July 2, 2025 by Angel Melanson
For some, Please Don’t Feed the Children, the feature directorial debut of Destry Allyn Spielberg — daughter of filmmaking luminary Steven — may arrive carrying much higher expectations than it deserves. It shouldn’t. Even if the elder Spielberg’s influence hadn’t long since metastasized at a molecular level in the bones of the entire entertainment industry, a nepotism accusation invariably means less than the sum of the creativity generated by the access, funds or opportunity granted to the famous-surnamed aspiring artist. And thankfully, there’s plenty to thrill and intrigue in what’s on screen here in this film (which hits Tubi today) beyond its credit block.
Set in a near-future wasteland where children are rounded up as the asymptomatic carriers of a devastating zombie outbreak, Please Don’t Feed the Children stars Zoe Colletti (The Family Plan) as Mary, a young woman on her own looking for an escape route to Mexico. After crossing paths with Jeffy (Dean Scott Vasquez), a pre-teen, self-described “master thief,” Mary joins his siblings and friends to investigate a secret tunnel intended to usher orphans like them past omnipresent military patrols to safety. Before they arrive at the location of the tunnel, however, a gunfight breaks out with a convenience store clerk during a stop for supplies and Ben (Andrew Liner) is wounded.
With authorities closing in on all sides, the group flees to a remote country home in search of medical supplies. There they encounter Clara (Michalle Dockery), who’s awaiting the return of her husband, a cop, but she agrees to mend Ben’s gunshot. Grateful but mistrustful, the group decides to steal her vehicle and resume their search for the escape tunnel. But they quickly discover that the woman’s cheerful demeanor conceals deeper secrets, realizing that they must band together to escape a fate that promises to be worse than getting turned over to the local militia for quarantining.
As similar as many aspects of this story are to other, recent undead-themed projects (in particular The Last of Us and 28 Years Later), the script for Please Don’t Feed the Children, by Paul Bertino, touches on an intriguing idea by chronicling a zombie outbreak almost exclusively from the perspective of children — and moreover, children who are believed to be responsible for it. Their quest for survival not only presents an immediate danger of execution, but the more existential consideration of inheriting a world that they didn’t create but for which they are being held responsible. For a 28-year-old like Spielberg (filmmaker or no), this feels analogous and palpable to the real-world weight heaped upon her or him by older generations, so dramatizing a familiar genre scenario from this perspective gives its telling here a fresh edge.
That said, the setup to this point of view is established more by telling than showing (perhaps owing to budgetary limitations), so it takes a significant amount of screen time before there’s a visual sense of, you know, zombies wreaking havoc on the living population. Even if the film comes at that premise from a different angle, that’s a part of this reality that needs a stronger presence. In its place, however, Bertino and Spielberg dial into another provocative idea as they explore Clara’s detainment of these kids and the ways that she views them in the context of the life that she had prior to the onset of flesh-eating monsters roaming the countryside.
After co-starring in the action thriller Flight Risk earlier this year, Downton Abbey mainstay Dockery is clearly trying to branch out in her career, and it makes sense (aside from executive producing the film) why she’d chase this one: it finds a middle ground between the proper English roles for which she’s known and something more foreign — an increasingly unhinged frontierswoman. I’m not convinced her performance always serves the film as well as a slightly more subdued turn might, and the fact that she’s actually British makes her stick out even more anachronistically in the conspicuously Midwestern landscape. But Bertino’s script, again, asks some questions of this grieving woman that other zombie movies wouldn’t, and it spurs curiosity about Clara even when her mysterious goals begin to infuriate the characters (and possibly viewers).
Directorially, Spielberg maneuvers the camera nimbly and maintains a consistent tone that keeps audiences in the headspace of Mary, this trauma-stricken young woman repeatedly confronted with situations that compound that pain. In that sense, the film is capital-B bleak and does not release that pressure even by the end of its story. But there’s a clarity she demonstrates with her lensing that not only captures navigable geography — be that between the aisles of a convenience store or in the crawlspace of a would-be homesteader’s residence — but hints at a versatility that could be applied to many different subjects with even greater success.
Again, however, viewers should note that this feels more of a piece with current genre trends towards emotional pain and anguish than the excitement and escapism of a latter-day slasher film. But if making an industry-rousing debut like her father did with Duel was an unlikely outcome (for many reasons unrelated to her last name), Destry Allyn Spielberg demonstrates with this that she has a dexterous understanding of technique, genre convention and emotional nuance. In name and concept, Please Don’t Feed the Children may arrive like an admonition, but the end result is a reminder that horror needs more directors who know their way around a camera — and they should be encouraged regardless of their family pedigree.
