Upon the film's limited release in theaters, reviews ranged from positive to mixed. In the
Village Voice, Michael Atkinson noted, "A brooding science-fiction trip enjoyed largely as a monologue. Luckily, Nikolic's lust for paranoid desperation is powerful, and his way with actors is stunningly graceful." Joe Leydon praised the film in
Variety: "Smoothly incorporating influences as diverse as Philip K. Dick and Terry Gilliam, Zenith commands attention and builds suspense by taking inventive detours through familiar territory." Maitland McDonagh wrote in
Film Journal International that the film weaves together "dystopian visions of a desensitized, crumbling future a la Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, in which ubiquitous techno-distractions, dispassionate sex and dependence on artificial sensation are gradually leaching the humanity from the human race." Jeannette Catsoulis in
The New York Times commented, this "bewildering collision of noir narration and purple paranoia may be long on atmosphere but is woefully short on sense." Noel Murray of
The A.V. Club gave the 90-minute film a C+, while calling it "an audacious, impressive feat of imagination, turning a few sets and characters into a generation-spanning look at a society where benevolence and malevolence are so finely interwoven that it’s hard to know what to fight against." Murray found that, in 90-minute film form, it "doesn’t fully work"; both the beginning and end of the film were "strong", but in between, the film seemed padded with "cheesy-looking sex and fight scenes, and with a doubling-back narrative structure" that was confusing, and looked like an "attempt to save money by reusing footage." Kevin Thomas wrote in the
Los Angeles Times "Many of Nikolic's concerns and motifs are familiar yet their expression here is vivid and idiosyncratic, designed to intensify a highly contemporary concern about the loss of freedom and power of the individual to secret, manipulative cartels." Brett Michel in the
Boston Herald gave the film a "B", and remarked, "persistent voiceover narration, a device that helps smooth over a lack of scene transitions — [is] one area that exposes the film’s budgetary limitations. Still, the use of dilapidated Brooklyn and Queens locations, creatively photographed by Vladimir Subotic, goes a ways toward selling a future not too far removed from ones en-visioned by Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard." Loren Smith of the
Boston Globe noted "With its bleak fatalism, “Zenith’’ at times echoes futuristic thrillers such as “12 Monkeys’’ and “Children of Men.’’ The shoestring budget is often obvious, with one too many strobe-light sequences, and it is dispiriting that even a movie set in 2044 has a gold-hearted hooker as the hero’s object of desire. But “Zenith’’ boasts terrific photography by Vladimir Subotic and offers a few genuine surprises. Director Nikolic shouldn’t remain “anonymous’’ for long: He gets solid performances from all the actors and creates an atmosphere of mounting paranoia that’s grim and chilling." ==References==