MadS (2024)

Opens with fast-paced middle-class white dude drug deal and a frustratingly tense drug-fueled drive home. It's the sort of driving that makes you expect a car crash, but clearly not the budget that can afford to film a classic Mustang crashing, so you're mostly frightened that they're going to try to do it anyway with bad CGI or lame implication. Thank god a zombie with a Tascam jumps in and stabs herself right to death, saving us the worry.

As our drug-fueled, zombie-blood-covered rich boy pulls his Mustang into his clearly rich-dad house, we first begin to realize that the driving scene was so neatly frustrating in part because it was all a single shot. Indeed, we're fifteen minutes in on one shot. There are exactly two cases when a film has 15-minute long shots: 1) it's a slow, impenetrable work of pretentious art, or 2) it's a single-take film. There's nothing slow, impenetrable, or pretentious about this one.

As the boy frantically washes the zombie blood off of his arm, his girlfriend comes over, and the camera follows her out to the pool to smoke and text message and generally give the kid time to prepare for his next scene: a pretty good drive to a party. But we're starting to hit the flaw with single-take films, and the party proves the point: no single scene can be particularly complex, so the whole plot must be built from a series of small, simple mini-vignettes. Vignettes such as walking from room to room in a party, with each room having a set of people asking "are you ok?" to the stoned guy. Telling a good story with reasonable pacing is pretty tough with these constraints, as is complex character development, and that's why I have time to write all of this text and not miss anything important.

One-by-one, the party kids zombify; slow transitions, as they run from a mostly-incompetent, heavily armed, highly-murderous military unit. It follows a pretty standard zombie movie escalation cycle, and hits all the standard zombie movie checkpoints. They're all on those drugs from the first scene, so a Brainscan ending is possible, but it could be a lame iZombie ending.

They went for a loud, throbbingly environmental electronica soundtrack, which is really the only choice besides uncomfortable silence, but they picked good throbs. It fits with the secondary problem of single-shot films, that in the brief moments when something important does happen, it has to be very exciting. Crank the synths up. The pacing remains painfully slow, but a brief interlude for a reenacted scene from Half-Life with screaming synths and strobing lights is a real nice touch. With the little snippets of phone calls and GPSs and Tascams talking in the background of several scenes and off-screen conversations, it has more than a little crossover with video game storytelling.

I assumed it was French-Canadian for some reason, until they eventually mention mention euros. The actors and actresses are young, pretty good, and have plenty of body language. I assume they're stage actors, since that's pretty much what a single-shot performance is, and their physical movements are quite theatrical. I don't know how they shot the scene where she runs in front of a train. The camera man really has to squeeze on to the elevator in the elevator scene.

Technically skilled filmmaking, the vehicle rides especially. No Brainscan, merely iZombie. Coulda been a short.