MadS (2024)

October 24, 2024 3:11 PM

[TRAILER] Club kid Romain has just graduated and makes a stop at his dealer's place to try a new pill. As he heads off to a party, he sees an injured woman on the side of the road and decides to help her. It's, um, not a fortuitous choice. A French horror film presented in "one shot" (actually five cleverly interconnected takes).

Starring Milton Riche, Lucille Guillaume, Laurie Pavy, Yovel Lewkowski, Sasha Rudakova, Vincent Pasdermadjian.

Written and directed by David Moreau. Produced by Yohan Baiada, David Danesi for Les Enfants Terribles. Cinematography by Philip Lozano. Music by Nathaniel Méchaly.

91% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Currently streaming in the US on Shudder. JustWatch listing.

posted by DirtyOldTown (5 comments total)

Just watched this the other day. It's surprisingly tight for a one-shot movie. There's some amount of the usual issue of having to get characters from one place to another, but they do a decent job of having something else happen concurrently. They cleverly manage to swap POV characters a couple times, and don't skimp on the practical gore. The physicality of the zombies is a cross between 28 Days Later and Gollum, and entertainingly effective. Nothing game-changing, but executed well and worth a recommendation to zombie fans. If nothing else, the title card was pretty awesome. It's the usual GIANT LETTERS over a driving scene, which is not notable... until the car drives under it.
posted by mrphancy at 10:16 PM on October 24, 2024 [2 favorites]

I was impressed with the mechanics of this and how they put it together. The actual story plays out like a few perfectly fine but not great French episodes of Black Summer.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:39 PM on October 26, 2024 [1 favorite]

I eventually got tired of the "French girls acting crazy" routine in this, but I enjoyed how disorienting it was in the first part, and switching the POV characters was a good trick to keep the story a bit more varied. Also I agree that the title bit was way cooler than it needed to be.

It's a minor nitpick, but I'm not really sure why the military person at the end does what she does after specifically explaining that you need to ingest the blood to be infected, and she hadn't.
posted by whir at 4:29 PM on October 26, 2024

I thought her leg was all torn up from the attack, and blood had gotten in that way.
posted by mrphancy at 8:00 AM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Two months later, to say, yeah, I think the "ingest blood" part probably got a little garbled in translation. Either that or she was just trying to reassure Julia, knowing it wouldn't particularly matter in the long run if she was wrong and Julia turned out to be infected after all.

I presume Julia is infected, though, given that she made out with (and was bitten by?) Romain, and actually did ingest some of Ana's blood. Not that it particularly matters, since everyone seems pretty much screwed at the end regardless.

I am a little confused about Ana's motivation, though. It doesn't seem like Julia actually realized Ana and Romain were a couple, and it also seemed like Ana was keeping their relationship a secret. TCM kept helpfully slapping captions (like "screaming") on top of the burned-in subtitles at various points, so I may have missed something. (I watch everything with subtitles on, because my hearing sucks, and TCM does not seem to grasp that I really only need them to tell me what someone's saying, not "ominous whooshing." Their tendency to layer on useless captions when people are speaking in a foreign language made, for instance, a lot of Better Call Saul kind of a pain in the ass.)
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:03 PM on December 30, 2024