Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Moreau
Starring: Milton Riche, Laurie Pavy, Lucille Guillaume
The most important development in the history of cinema was the
invention of editing. With the ability to splice two pieces of film
together, filmmakers suddenly had the power to manipulate time and
space, placing them on an almost even keel with novelists when it came
to storytelling. For most of cinema's history, the limitations in the
physical length of film reels meant editing was a necessity if you
wanted to tell a story longer than 10 minutes. That's no longer an issue
with digital filmmaking, which allows filmmakers to shoot for hours at a
time without interruption. This freedom has resulted in a wave of films
that purport to be filmed in a single unbroken take. Of course, most of
these films - like Sam Mendes' 1917, the most high profile example - actually use clever editing and
digital effects to create the illusion of an unbroken take, the modern
equivalent of Hitchcock panning his camera behind the backs of his
characters' heads in his 1948 "single take" thriller Rope.
Occasionally we get unbroken take thrillers that are the real deal,
where the movie actually was shot in a single unbroken take without any
invisible editing or digital manipulation. The best of such films is the
German thriller Victoria, which takes us on a wild, real time ride across a couple of early
morning hours in Berlin. With MadS, director David Moreau (best known for his 2006 home
invasion thriller Them) has set himself the challenge of documenting something akin to a
zombie apocalypse in a single unbroken take. The result is technically
dazzling, filled with moments that will have you silently mouthing the
words "How the fuck did they do that?" (a sequence involving an oncoming
train is incredible), but like so many films that adopt this technique,
it often suffers from the cinematic equivalent of dead air as we're left
to wait while the camera simply follows a character between point A and
B, the exact reason why editing was invented. In such lulls, we find
ourselves thinking about the filmmaking rather than the film.
The narrative begins at dusk on the outskirts of a small French town
where rich kid Romain (Milton Riche) is preparing to
celebrate his birthday by scoring some drugs from his dealer. Among the
usual powders and pills is a mysterious new cocaine-like substance that
Romain wastes no time in ingesting before hopping into his father's
Mustang and driving back to town for a night of hedonism. His bad trip
begins when he stops to brush some cigarette ash off the leather seats
and a woman clad in so many bandages she resembles a mummy hops into his
car. Missing her tongue, the woman is unable to speak but she has in her
possession a tape recorder from which she plays a recording of a doctor
discussing some sort of human experiments. Unwilling to call the cops
while he's high as a kite, Romaine intends to drop the woman off at a
nearby hospital, but his plan is scuppered when she stabs herself to
death.
With this dramatic opening, Moreau establishes a narrative that his
film refuses to follow in the traditional sense. Instead MadS skirts around its story as it follows first David and then two
other youngsters in the manner of Alan Clarke's Elephant. Something potentially apocalyptic is going on here, but we're never
made privy to its full details. There are no cutaways to the French
government making plans in a bunker, or of scientists being woken in the
night to deal with this emergency. Instead we follow three very wasted
teenagers, each of whom believe they're the most important figure in
this whole scenario. At a certain point we switch focus to Romaine's
girlfriend Anais (Laurie Pavy) and later to her
friend Julia (Lucille Guillaume), with implications that the
latter may ultimately be the Sarah Connor figure of this particular
Armageddon. All three young performers are fantastic and really earn
their fee as the filmmaking necessitates a degree of athleticism and
essentially requires them to perform their own stunts at points.
Some bleak comedy is mined from said teens trying to figure out if the
world is really collapsing or they're simply having a very bad trip, but
for the most part MadS plays out its apocalyptic drama with a straight face, and with
violence that recalls the New French Extremity movement that peaked two
decades ago. Along with Clarke's aforementioned unconventional IRA
thriller, Gaspar Noe's Irreversible is clearly an influence here, and there's an argument to be made
that MadS might prove more effective if it played its narrative in reverse,
beginning with the end of the world and taking us back to a tranquil
late evening in the idyllic French countryside in just 90 minutes.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of MadS' real-time storytelling is how it hammers home just how quickly the
world we take for granted can fall apart.
MadS is on Shudder from
October 18th.
