As likely as not, the night the end of the world begins will look a lot like most other nights. Maybe you’ll put the kids to bed and relax for just a bit before the strange noises start outside. Or if you’re younger and more risk-tolerant, maybe you’ll be headed to a party when all hell breaks loose.
It’s here we find ourselves at the outset of the new French movie MadS (I still don’t understand the title, could someone please explain it to me?), as twenty-something party guy Romain snorts some kind of drug, he’s not even sure exactly what, and heads out for a wild night. But as he’s driving to his destination, he finds an extremely distressed and heavily bandaged woman by the side of the road, and the reason she won’t answer his questions is that she no longer has a tongue. She does, though, have an audio recorder that’s playing back something from a doctor who’s clearly conducting a terrible experiment.
Things get bad, and then they get worse, and the movie plays out as if it’s all one continuous take, in real time. And while I’m not sure the film couldn’t have been just as effective if they hadn’t taken this approach, for the most part it avoids the problems that make most movies like this feel gimmicky—it’s not particularly showy about being one long take, and we even sometimes forget this is what it’s doing. It can’t avoid all the inherent problems, especially with one stretch early on really sagging, as we follow Romain just wandering around as what’s about to happen to him develops inside him, but after that, boy does it ramp up.
MadS owes a lot to Danny Boyle’s groundbreaking quasi-zombie film 28 Days Later, both aesthetically and in content, enough so that you might call this 28 Days Earlier and it would make perfect sense. And one magnificent scene even has whispers of Claire Denis’s appalling sex cannibal masterpiece Trouble Every Day, though less because of what we’re seeing, and more because the camera refuses to look away. While MadSmay not be those movies, this is good company to keep for a film that’s tense throughout, and occasionally horrifying.
MadS is streaming on Shudder.
