MadS

“Stay calm. A problem has arisen. An operator will contact you.”

When every human inhabitant of this planet is gone, will elevators be left talking to each other? This is one of several machine voices we hear during the course of David Moreau’s frantic thriller, which unfolds like a stream of consciousness and maintains that quality even as its human characters become less and less conscious of themselves. Heavy with social subtext and playing out like a societal farewell, it’s a vibrant piece of cinema dominated by a sense of individual and collective tragedy.

Romain (Milton Riche) has been hanging out with his dealer, messing around and snorting a few lines of a new drug, before he decides to drive home along twilit country roads in his dad’s open-top Mustang. He may be taking risks, and enjoying it, but he’s not an altogether irresponsible young man, and when he spots a distressed woman by the side of the road, bandaged in multiple places and covered in dirt, he immediately stops to help her. Whilst he calls the emergency services, trying to work out how he can get her help without getting himself into trouble, she waves her arms around frantically, trying to communicate something in the apparent absence of the ability to speak. She produces a small audio recorder, anxiously gesticulating as it plays. “Subject C39, aged between 20 and 22, nationality unknown...extraction of teeth and salivary glands as a security measure...contamination achieved after injections with retrovirus-infected blood.”

This is as much as we ever learn about the origins of the situation. Before they reach the city, she’s dead, and Romain and the car are covered in blood. Distraught and clearly suffering from shock, he parks the car in the garage and stumbles through to the shower. Before he can get himself together, however, he’s getting a phone call from his dad about a planned meeting the following day, and then his girlfriend Anaïs (Lucille Guillaume) shows up, and they’re supposed to be going to a party. Between the shock and fear of what people might think if he tries to explain, he goes along with everything, doing his best to seem normal. But is he normal? What might at first be attributable to the psychological impact of these experiences, or to the drugs he took, or to the further drugs and alcohol he consumes at the party, gradually begins to look like something else.

A one-shot film whose pace never slackens, MadS evokes a youthful perspective in which everything is immediate and more time is spent on simply living than on processing or analysing events. The most obvious comparator is Cloverfield, but it feels much more raw; Moreau uses an omniscient camera and uses tricks like blurring images and shifting light levels to put us inside his characters’ heads. There is music playing most of the way through, loud and pulsing, sometimes subject to the same distortions. He’s very good at giving the impression of chaos whilst maintaining tight control. There’s a rhythm to it that makes the strangest things feel natural. Nothing here is forced or out of place, exactly, in that the action follows a logical progression, just with instinctive behaviour increasingly dominant. By the time it becomes obvious how wrong things have gone, it’s far, far too late.

We’ve all seen zombie movies before, and at its core this is basically the same thing, but it feels different – firstly because of its immersiveness and secondly because of the quality of the performances, which are superb throughout. Riche and Guillaume, in particular, are confident and convincing throughout, from the first tiny hints of disordered movement or thinking through to the extremes. Affected in waves, they have moments of relative lucidity, and the anguish that comes through in these is heartbreaking. There is a suggestion that they seek refuge in mania because they feel so overwhelmed by the violence they witness. The world has come to feel so strange and so horrific that they change in order to make sense of it – and we are back to the social commentary.

Moreau understands his characters and their world intimately, along with the natural elements of chaos and loss of control often present at the stage in life. We meet few older adults, and it’s clear that some of them are a threat. Life goes on at breakneck pace, and who knows if there will be a future?

“Remain calm,” says another emotionless, uncomprehending, disembodied voice.