Brian Duffield is having quite the year, as both a screenwriter/story developer and director. Before the world completely isolated itself, Duffield co-wrote and gave us the delightful (and criminally underseen) Underwater, which mixed eldritch and cosmic horror with an undersea riff on Alien. Earlier this month, Duffield wrote and directed Spontaneous, a film that mixed YA tropes and a coming-of-age story with some severely powerful metaphors for the existential dread of being a teenager in the 21st century. And now we have Love and Monsters, another story conceived and co-written by Duffield, starring the ever affable Dylan O’Brien.

Dude’s on a roll and I am here for it.

In a bit of opening narration, Joel (Dylan O’Brien) tells explains that when he was 17, the world as we know it ended. A giant asteroid hurtling towards Earth was ultimately destroyed as countries around the world shot rockets at it. Unfortunately, the chemical compounds used in the rockets rained down on the world and cold-blooded creatures grew to monstrous proportions and began eating everyone. Joel explains that 95% of the population was decimated in the first year and that those who survived hid anywhere they could.

Seven years later and Joel feels like the odd man out in a bunker filled with couples. Back when he was 17, he lost both of his parents in the ensuing chaos and was separated from Aimee (Jessica Henwick), AKA the love of his life. Joel’s not really suited for the post apocalyptic life as he spends most of his time cooking for his bunker mates, while creating a photo journal, drawing and describing all of the monsters they’ve faced. Consider it a Monstrous Manual for the apocalypse. One day, while scrolling through radio frequencies, he finds Aimee alive and well in a colony only 85 miles away (a seven day trip on foot). So when the frequency goes dead in the middle of one of their conversations, he realizes that he has to leave the bunker and go locate his high school love.

Love and Monsters takes a traditional coming of age story and wraps it in 50s style super-sized monsters and apocalyptic fiction. It’s a boy and his dog story that chronicles a very unlikely journey across a fantastically designed and inventive world filled with giant monsters. Along the way, Joel meets other survivors, including a wonderfully acted dog named Boy and a pair of survivors named Clyde (Michael Rooker) and Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt). While the script downplays the ridiculousness of Joel’s impulsive decision to travel, completely unprepared, into a world he no longer understands, the addition of Clyde and Minnow add a nice, grounded and dryly humorous commentary on his unequippedness.

Clyde flatout tells him he’s on a fool’s errand: “Out here, alone? You don’t know a thing about survival. You shoot for shit, yet you have an attitude like you’re a noble warrior floating on the winds of love. It don’t work like that.” A robot named MAV1S he later encounters is more abrupt in her analysis of his journey, nonchalantly informing him of the possibility that Aimee won’t see his grand romantic gesture and that he will have traveled a great distance only to be met with disappointment.

“There are so many ways you could perish,” she informs him moments from shutting down herself.

What makes Love and Monsters work is the earnest way it tackles Joel’s situation and the ridiculousness of the world he’s found himself in. Dylan O’Brien is always charming and he turns out a great performance here that mixes naivety with plucky resolve. But it’s the monster effects and the world-building that really pulled me in, from the chitinous centipedes that are obviously homages to Tremors to a cliffside pockmarked with giant honeycombs, the mostly CGI creations spark with more life than movies with twice the budget.

Much like Joel, the story feels authentic in its earnestness and while most of the apocalyptic tropes utilized have been used countless times before, there’s enough heart to life it from the obvious 80s/90s inspirations. A lightweight throwback to the PG/PG-13 teen action adventure films I grew up watching, Love and Monsters is a winner.