And you thought your OkCupid date was bad

The world is ready for a zom-rom-com. That's zombie romantic comedy. It sounds more like an identity crisis, but just roll with it; Warm Bodies will surprise you.

Just when I thought our civilization couldn't hold another piece of the as-yet-to-take-place zombie apocalypse — from video games, comics, podcasts, books, movies and TV's rapidly decomposing Walking Dead — George Romero's famous genre, with its lumbering living dead shuffling around for braaaaaaains, has come up with something fresh, downright charming even.

The film begins with narration that casts a non-judgmental eye on society's deteriorating state: Here is the world now. Here is the chaos. Here is a zombie. Here is a zombie eating someone. "And, oh, by the way, I'm a zombie." The narrator is R — just the letter R — because he's been dead so long that he can't really remember the rest of the letters. Though he speaks to us with wit and a splendid self-deprecating sense of humor, R can only manage a grunt or two within the world he inhabits. He does have interests, though ("Yeah, I'm a hoarder"), and even a zombie friend who stands next to him at a demolished airport bar and grunts during their daily bro-date.

R's wandering zombie routine is interrupted when non-zombie Julie is sniffed out in a nearby pharmacy. Against R's primal zombie instincts, he saves Julie (after munching on her friends) and walks her back to his curio-stocked zombie lair on an airplane, where he tells her in one-word sentences that she'll be safe until the roaming undead scatter. She, of course, is mortified of him — his cold skin, his hazy eyes that often stare uncomfortably at her, and a gaping chest wound that she created in a fit of panic — but then he starts forming rudimentary sentences and they struggle through conversation. The movie doesn't throw her into his arms; he really has to work for it until he earns her admiration. "You're very different than all the others," she says. What she doesn't know is that her warmth and compassion are healing R's cold, dead, mucus-y zombie heart.

There are other moving parts to this machine, including John Malkovich, playing Julie's father, who is hunting for a zombie cure yet finds it unbelievable that R might be curing himself with his daughter's affection. Another subspecies of zombie also turns up: the bonies, super-feral creatures that have un-evolved even past their undead counterparts. These are the film's real villains, and Warm Bodies must have had a tight budget because the CGI models for each one are identical, as if only one were created and then ctrl-v'd in the background. The subpar effects are noticeable, yet also forgivable once you start getting attached to R and Julie's Romeo-meets-Juliet-in-a-cannibal-kitchen romance.

R is played by Nicholas Hoult, who played the curious little boy sharing the screen — correction: owning the screen — around Hugh Grant in About a Boy. He plays a convincing zombie with an impeccable shuffle and his taste in vintage vinyl is noteworthy. Julie is played by relative newcomer Teresa Palmer, a lovely actress whose job, falling for a decaying corpse, is a grueling task that she pulls off with heartwarming believability. I loved these two and their awkward moments.

Warm Bodies, a title that sounds more like a late-night feature on Cinemax than a quirky horror-comedy, takes some zombie liberties that purists will grumble at — "Zombies can't open doors! Blasphemy!" — but considering the film is so richly humorous I think the zombiephiles will forgive some of the genre-bending sequences as they did with the last original zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead. And just listen to all the fantastic music: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chad Valley, M83 and many more. Each song fits the scenes they appear in perfectly. In one sequence, R puts on "Patience" by Guns N' Roses, a playlist choice so fitting it's as if the whole song, sad whistling and all, existed to prop up this scene. A gag with a Roy Orbison song and a Pretty Woman reference also turns up with a rewarding payoff.

The movie is directed by Jonathan Levine, a young filmmaker with a knack for movies about young people — alive and dead — treading their own path in complicated worlds with rules dictated by others. His 50/50 and The Wackness are exceptional films that showcased his unmistakable skill for the language of filmmaking. Warm Bodies is more of Levine having fun and letting loose, and I enjoyed the places he took me.

Warm Bodies asks a lot from its audience, but don't all zombie movies? Certainly if you can accept a movie where the dead rise from the earth and start eating people, then you can also accept that perhaps, just maybe, a zombie and a human can put aside all that bitter violence to fall in love. It's not that much of a stretch, and Levin guides you to that point with careful cleverness. This is the first hit of 2013, and it could not have been more unexpected.

Zom-rom-com will not be alone long, though. I predict a zombie opera before long. A zopera. Or maybe a zombie western. Hey, the more the merrier.