MadS — David Moreau

Writer-director David Moreau has set himself a tall task with his new film MadS, namely how to rejuvenate the moribund zombie sub-genre while also justifying the use of the annoyingly prevalent one-single-long-take gimmick. Regarding the later, we’ve discussed before the limitations of this particular formal gambit; for every One Shot or The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, low-budget movies that utilize the format in new, inventive ways, there’s elephantine productions like 1917 or Birdman that simply rely on digital trickery and copious CGI in a dubious attempt at chest-thumping. It’s hollow showmanship (as critic Adam Nayman has suggested elsewhere, regarding Iñárritu’s penchant for single-take tomfoolery, the “virtuosity feels second-hand”). But Moreau mostly sidesteps these issues by keeping his film resolutely small-scaled; it’s the apocalypse winnowed down to a few friends navigating first a party and then the streets of their small French suburb. It’s effective because it never bites off more than it can chew (so to speak).

The film begins with Romain (Milton Riche) buying some drugs (and zealously sampling the product) for his birthday party scheduled later in the evening. Romain is home alone, house-sitting for his overbearing father and sneaking out with dad’s classic Mustang convertible. While driving back from the deal, Romain spills his score in the car and pulls over to try to clean it up. Suddenly, a bloodied, bandaged-up woman crawls into the passenger seat and begins frantically gesticulating. She starts playing a recording, which relays some needed exposition — the woman has escaped from some sort of medical testing facility, and has had her teeth and tongue removed. Unable to communicate, she instead begins repeatedly stabbing herself, covering Romain and the car in arterial spray. High as hell and in shock, Romain first calls the police, then decides to continue home and figure out how to conceal events from his father. Upon arriving, girlfriend Anaïs (Laurie Pavy) starts knocking on his door, asking for money but otherwise unaware of the crime scene currently sitting in the garage. As Romain and Anaïs prepare to leave for the party, he begins feeling strange; it’s unclear to him at first if it’s shock, the drugs still coursing through his system, or something altogether more sinister. Of course, we in the audience know what’s happening, and it’s only a matter of time before Romain transforms into something.

Like many of its one-take brethren, MadS stumbles the most when the technique distends or otherwise complicates what should be relatively straightforward exposition, those little bits of information required to set up characters and usher them into the plot proper. Instead of simple cuts, we instead must follow Romain as he drives home, wanders the house, showers, etc. Whatever the gimmick supposedly enhances, like real-time tension, it also hampers, like wasting time focusing on Anaïs while she smokes a cigarette and checks her phone. But things quicken once the couple arrive at their destination. Throngs of people dance and snort lines to thrumming techno music as Romain wanders the party in a haze, his eyes glowing red under the pulsating lights. There’s some drama around the margins; Romain’s father calls him and wants to know why the alarm is going off at the house, Anaïs’ friend Julia (Lucille Guillaume) reveals that she’s pregnant with Romain’s child, and in a fit of rage Romain beats another man to within an inch of his life. It’s all very busy, and the tension comes to a head when Romain discovers that the body he left in the Mustang is still alive and moving around, and black-ops soldiers in tactical gear show up and start shooting anything that moves. It’s here that Moreau smartly switches gears, allowing the narrative to splinter off and follow Anaïs as she searches for the missing Romain, and then splintering a second time as an infected Anaïs begins hunting Julia. Moreau escalates things with a sure hand, opening up the scenario from the confines of a couple of houses to the now-empty streets of the suburban enclave and eventually apartments that have become hiding places for survivors and infected alike. It’s not a novel narrative idea; there have been enough zombie movies by now that every conceivable variation of these tropes has an antecedent. To wit, MadS owes much more to 28 Days Later and the recent The Sadness than Romero’s molasses-slow metaphors, and Philip Lozano’s sinewy, snaking camerawork deserves much of that credit here, as the pokey first act gives way to frenetic action and lots of handheld motion. So if this is all familiar stuff, it’s also fast-paced, occasionally very scary, and resolutely downbeat. Sometimes that’s enough.