Elena and Joaquín are packing for a trip they have been looking forward to. They are also, quietly, finishing with each other. Both things are happening in the same small apartment on the same ordinary morning, and only one of them is going to get interrupted.
Together Till the End premieres on BloodStream on August 5 before expanding to other digital and VOD platforms, and it belongs to a small, stubborn category of zombie movie. The dead are not the subject. They are a scheduling problem. Salvador Medina wrote and directed it, expanding his own short with Jimena Bilsup and Rolando Breme returning as the couple.
Two people who already know where it hurts
Their resentments are not screenwriting resentments. Nobody summarizes the relationship’s problems for the audience. They snipe with the precision of people who have had this fight enough times to skip the setup, and they know which sentence will land hardest. Medina befriended both actors after the short and went to them before writing the feature, rehearsing well ahead of the 2022 shoot.
There are no heroics. When the outbreak reaches the city, Elena and Joaquín stay inside, ration badly, and take it out on each other. They also open the tequila, which is the single most realistic decision anyone makes in the entire movie. Medina named Shaun of the Dead as a reference before I could ask, though that film is about a man who needs to grow up. This one is about two people deciding whether to keep going.
The apartment is the movie
Almost all of it happens in one flat. I asked Medina whether that was money or intent.
“It was kind of both. As soon as I started writing it, I thought we don’t have much money. I think for production we had 15k, like $15,000.” He volunteered that figure, and something better: he cut a different ending because it “implied the whole budget going double or triple.”
Then it stops being an economics story. “To me, that place was … an important character,” he said, “because they had to have a reason to stay there. It was not just a survival, but they were kind of starting their life together as a couple.”
That is the difference between a contained film and a trapped one. Elena and Joaquín cannot leave, and they also do not want to, and the second reason is the one doing the damage. A breakup requires somewhere to go.
Mostly the money does not show. The set design is the win, an apartment full of the junk of two people who never finished unpacking. The camera work is the loss, with inconsistent framing and coverage that goes flat where the scene needed pressure.
The zombies you mostly hear
You do not see much of the dead, and the film is stronger for it. Threat arrives as noise in the hallway and as what the actors do with their faces. Joaquín is the most useful character precisely because he is not good at this. At one point he cleans zombie blood off himself and then wipes his eye with the same rag, and I spent the next twenty minutes waiting for that to matter. It does not. Infection runs through bites, and Medina called the blood “more like a visual cue than anything else.” Joaquín would absolutely die of something like the rag in a film with different rules, and Medina knows it: “Joaquin is kind of this man child that doesn’t plan ahead.”
Martha
Sophie Gómez plays Elena’s mother, Martha, through video calls, and she is the best thing in the film. An established actor who built her career in Mexico, Gómez joined the production through a mutual friend and worked for free. “She did everything for free, she gave us the whole day. She got the location,” Medina said. They shot her final scene in three takes, in weather nobody had arranged. “We didn’t plan for the rain. And it worked perfectly, because that rain wasn’t planned.”
Her last scene undoes Elena completely, and it is where the movie stops being about a couple and starts being about what people lose when systems fail.
The man who thinks he is one of the good ones
Then Giovanni Gamba arrives, and the film’s real argument shows up with him. He is helpful. He is polite. He is very clear that he is not like other men, and he is the most dangerous thing in the building.
Medina wanted men, as a category, to register as a threat, and reached for the bear-or-man thought experiment. “There’s so much violence in Mexico against women,” he said. “I kind of wanted to make this villain, this agent of chaos, the representation of that.”
What keeps it from being a lecture is that he turns it on himself. “Men don’t think they’re doing anything wrong until they actually do it. Like, oh, I haven’t done anything. Have you talked to the partners you have been with?”
Surviving each other
Medina kept phones and feeds mostly out of frame on purpose. “These two characters in particular, Joaquin and Elena, kind of needed to see each other. And it kind of took the world ending for them to reach that conclusion.”
That is the film. The dead outside are a deadline. The relationship is the emergency.
Together Till the End premieres exclusively on BloodStream on August 5, 2026.
