MadS (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Horror fans, as a rule, want new ways of telling familiar stories. Zombie films are notoriously hard to keep down, much like their characteristic monsters, and tend to reinvent their own subgenre more often that most others in horror. Enter MadS, the newest zombie movie with an axe to grind, which debuted on the festival circuit and did not receive a wide release in the US. Its singular vision of a world tipping into chaos is on par with some of the best filmmaking -- horror or otherwise -- I've seen in a long time. Though its story runs thin, its technical aspects and style repeatedly had me picking my jaw up off my chest.

It starts with Romain (Milton Riche), a young man ready for a birthday night of partying with friends, getting new drugs from his dealer and testing them out. His wealthy father is away but watching the house cameras, reachable by phone. Leaving his dealer high and ready to go, Romain drives home through a rural area; stopping briefly after a cigarette mishap, a stranger materializes and jumps into his convertible. The stranger seems female but is mostly covered by bandages, even her fingertips; she grunts and indicates that he must start the car and continue driving, but he's reasonably hesitant to acquiesce. En route to the hospital, the stranger pulls out an audio recording device and plays it, the sound of a man speaking in medical jargon describes what seem to be horrific experiments being performed on someone. The mute woman is the likely victim. But her erratic behavior intensifies until she starts stabbing herself in the vehicle, soaking Romain with her blood and getting it in his mouth before he's aware of what's happening.

Getting home, a traumatized Romain panics and tries to clean up before his girlfriend Ana (Laurie Pavy) arrives. He's standoffish to a fault, and it seems likely that she might be about to break up with him, but he's also terribly distracted this evening and acting strangely. After all, checking the garage again reveals that his unwanted hitchhiker has vanished. Ana chalks it up to his birthday, so when their friends arrive, he unwillingly agrees to go with them to a nearby house party. On the way, he experiences some weird sensory phenomena, including attraction and fixation on bright lights and muffled hearing. After arriving at the party, he's overstimulated and tries to hide, overhearing a conversation in which he learns that Julia (Lucille Guillaume), a mutual friend of his and Ana, is pregnant with his child. A furious Ana leaves the party upon this revelation and Romain physically assaults another man before fleeing home as his father calls and says there is a disturbance on the monitors.

Rushing home, Romain satisfies their security company and avoids police being summoned, but the night is still young. The party must go on, right? Even though several people have now partaken of Romain's new drugs and are now scattered around town. Even though many of them are now exhibiting troubling, scary, and violent behaviors. Even though many of them have swapped saliva, sweat, and blood. 

Oh, and by the by, the entire film is shot in a single take. Or at least made to appear so in a more convincing and less obvious way than most other single-take films.

MadS is brilliant not because it dares to depict a zombie outbreak in realistic terms but because it does so in a way that does not bring attention to its showy presentation. In fact, there isn't much pretense at all here. The single-take approach is less for spectacle and awe and more for focusing our attention on particular moments for particular characters and showing how the flow of information is so much less important in a crisis than the lived reality for people involved. Chaos and confusion abound, but the camera isolates one, then another, and finally a third character as its focal points to guide us through the (roughly) three acts of this one-night, one-take narrative. In that way, this feels like writer and director David Moreau's answer to a laundry list of increasingly spectacle-oriented zombie fare in the last few decades: take it back to George A. Romero's basics. A few people knowing nothing and trying to defend/protect themselves as the world devolves into hell.

As a directorial debut, the film is astonishing. His willingness to avoid heightened or elevated material is admirable, and the result is a roller coaster ride of bleak chaos. It also eschews the frustrating tendency for zombie movies to rely on CGI or extensive prosthetics and makeup to work. Moreau's focus is squarely on the performers, mostly French, who act their pants off to portray the onset of a viral outbreak. Twitchy and paranoid, the characters barrel through mostly nonverbal sequences of feigned madness -- no doubt contributing to the film's title -- the camera hovering around them in bouts of fear, hysterical laughter, lucid attempts at escape, and even psychotic attacks on other people. When help arrives, it's in unmarked black vans by masked strangers with large guns, and we're never meant to know if they are good or bad, only that they shoot and kill on sight.

MadS is a fierce and vicious entry in a long generic history that deserves a lot more attention.