Release Date: May 29
Director: Bruce McDonald
Writer: Tony Burgess
Cinematographer: Miroslaw Baszak
Starring: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle,
Georgina Reilly
Studio/Run Time: IFC Films, 95 mins.
Talk-radio zombies from Canada
In the wee hours, in the snow-covered
Canadian village of Pontypool, DJ Grant Mazzy begins his nightly
radio show. The children are asleep, the insomniacs and
third-shifters are tuned in, and, if the bizarre reports coming into
the station are to be believed, zombies are gradually taking over the
town. Mazzy is a deep-voiced, veteran shock jock, a
cowboy-hat-wearing troublemaker whose radio show—by his own
admission—works best when it pisses people off. As Mazzy explains,
a pissed-off listener doesn’t switch stations, plus he might even
call his friends and get them mad, too, and when this simple
talk-radio strategy of viral anger finds its eerie parallel in a
zombie epidemic, Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool begins to throb with
horror-tinged social commentary. This epidemic—or whatever it is—spreads not through neck bites or brain suck but through
something far more common, something in the air between you and me.
Rarely straying from the interior of
the radio station, Pontypool feeds its characters (and us)
information through phoned-in reports. The floating camera is trained
on Mazzy when the traffic reporter dials in from his chopper, and it
watches the surprised exchanges between the DJ and his engineer when
terrified citizens call with unbelievable stories. The station is in
the eye of the storm; it’s both a receiver and a broadcaster,
and—get this—it’s housed in the basement of a church.
As a story told in fragments, Pontypool
works much better than McDonald’s previous film, The Tracey
Fragments (unless Ellen Page was actually playing a zombie in that
film instead of just another disaffected teen). He builds such
perfectly modulated suspense that the film provokes not only
curiosity about what’s going to happen but also ideas about what it
all means. It’s horror of the imagination, much like Orson Welles’
classic radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds but in reverse; if
the epidemic is a hoax, the broadcasters are among the victims.
Should they look out their windows or rely on unknown third parties
to bring them the news; are they primary source reporters or mere
aggregators?
More provocative still is the potent
idea that words are powerful and dangerous, that information
corrupts, inspires, subverts, and engages us, and that it may even
encourage us to eat our peers with fava beans and fine Chianti.
With unseen and barely heard threats
Pontypool holds the tension, but when those elements eventually show
up on the screen as blood and carnage, the movie begins to feel like
the inside of a package that was better left wrapped. It’s the sort
of disappointment that some people felt at the end of The Blair Witch
Project, but Pontypool’s conclusion offers food for thought—so
to speak—that may not be obvious until some time later. In its
final third the film makes a very subtle but irreversible shift in
perspective. Does it happen when Mazzy leaves the safe, warm confines
of the booth to venture into well-traveled movie territory? Or when
he listens to a recording from the BBC? Or when he conflates the
words “kill” and “kiss?” Or when one character physically
attacks an infected individual? I won’t say, but sensing and
respecting that shift is the key to the film’s ending. It’s a
thinking man’s zombie movie, a satisfyingly weird piece of
filmmaking that feels like it could have been made 50 years ago,
would have been particularly relevant ten years ago, and still hums
in the age of blogs and YouTube.