The first scene of The Pastor Brothers’ horror film Carriers did not leave me with much hope for the remaining ones; when does gorgeous cinematography become over-direction, and are these teen-aimed jibes going to make this another tiresome slog through familiar territory? Surprisingly, this low-key thriller, although minor fare and hardly inventive, is worth more than its box office dollars will ever tell you.

Carriers refreshingly does away with the preambles that have predominantly plagued the horror genre, plonking the viewer right into the milieu of a post-apocalyptic landscape ravaged by a virus that turns the infected into crusty, degenerating piles of rotting meat. The story revolves around two brothers - the arrogant and supposedly immune Brian (Star Trek’s Chris Pine), with his girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo), and smart but frustrated (after Yale University was shut down by the virus) Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci), with his friend Emily VanCamp (Kate) - as they drive across a desolate American landscape in search of shelter.

Although it begins painstakingly, things get more interesting once the gang comes across a desperate father (Oz star Christopher Meloni) and his ill daughter, who claim that a school far away has a vaccine. It is here that we see the wide effects of the virus, of how people have killed each other, and racial tensions have reached an apex (with a crude sign reading “the Chinks brought it”). Perhaps most disturbing is a brief glimpse of a dump truck full of human remains, bagged up like cases of rotting meat, and it is these little details that in many ways make this worthwhile (another being a messily-scrawled sign over a gas station that reads “Mike is dead”).

Again, though not particularly original, Carriers manages some mild creepiness throughout the journey, such as when the team comes across a doctor driven to mania by his failure to devise a vaccine, who eerily declares that “sometimes choosing life is just choosing the more painful form of death”. The film also manages to nail the paranoia that would surely be endemic in a scenario such as this, where a speck of blood near a wound or an opening can mean death. One particularly telling scene has the father reluctant to help his daughter to a portable toilet in fear that the gang will drive off the second he leaves, which totally underpins the inherent lack of trust it takes to stay alive.

Still, in many ways, Carriers is also about the inertia and cabin fever of the apocalypse; it is like a less humourous Zombieland, for we see them riding golf carts and squatting at a lush abandoned hotel, and while it is a strange execution for a seemingly straight-laced horror, it mostly works. Furthermore, when it wants to be, it is quite suspenseful, managing a few jumpy moments that don’t rely on cranking the score up to 11.

Though generally steering clear from melodrama, the film does have a savage mean streak, embodied in Pine’s character Brian, who is ruthless right to the film’s climax, although in actuality is also probably the group’s natural born leader. The moral tension between him and the more human (but consequently more vulnerable) others leads to an ending that delivers a satisfying end just when you think that it might succumb to more conventional genre elements, such as delivering an added jump scare at the end, or de-evolving into a ham-fisted romance story.

All in all, Carriers is a minimalist, meditative, and gorgeously photographed horror film that does little to reinvent the genre, but is a breath of fresh air in a stale genre due to its genuine emotional plausibility and lack of idiotic characters.