Affamés, Les |
Canada • 2017 • 104m •
  • Directed by: Robin Aubert. • Starring: Marc-André Grondin, Monia Chokri, Charlotte St-Martin, Micheline Lanctôt, Marie-Ginette Guay, Brigitte Poupart, Édouard Tremblay-Grenier, Luc Proulx, Didier Lucien, Robert Brouillette, Martin Héroux, Patrick Hivon, Claire Guillon. • Music by: Pierre-Philippe Côté.     In a small, remote village in upstate Quebec, things have changed. Locals are not the same anymore - their bodies are breaking down and they have turned against their loved ones. A handful of survivors goes hiding into the woods, looking for others like them.
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Review:
The problem was, and this is the curse of many modern filmmakers, especially so-called auteurs and a significant segment of Eurocinema, is that the director and cinematographer here were trying for artistic and just ended up with arty. The former is profound, moving; the latter is simply self-indulgent, creating staged tableaux and meandering shots simply to try to impress the viewer with their technique. This movie is terribly self-indulgent. I can see the beginnings of a mature hand and eye for artistic cinema, but it's still completely undeveloped.
Other issues, most of which also tend to be endemic in so-called auteur and portions of Eurocinema:
1) Ambiguity is fine. Many times, it even elevates a movie. But there's a limit to how often you can raise a question and then refuse to give anything even approximating a clue as to the answer. That limit usually occurs right around the point where you've gone the whole movie without doing much of anything else. We are given no context for, well, anything. What are these creatures? Living, dead? They seem to act with sufficient cunning to lay traps but then spend their time running wildly at humans. What in the name of all that is holy was the deal with Demers? Was he brain-damaged? Did he really just return to town (Bonin's muttered comment after the first time the guy pops up seems to imply he never went anywhere) and how did he manage to get that far unharmed? How did he manage to stay unharmed so long that it took a normal human to kill him? What was the deal with the construction by the "zombies"? Not answering the question there is one thing. Not even hinting at why they were so fascinated (and, for that matter, how they managed to be nimble enough to pile stuff at the top) was a grievous misstep. It would also have been nice to see a hint regarding why the "zombies" broke off pursuit the first time the humans encountered them worshipping at one of the constructs but not subsequent time. And speaking of the humans, how do all these people know each other, and how did the ones that were apparently outsiders make it all the way into the region? And, once in there, what exactly was their plan to leave, and why did it involve walking 20 yards away from the one point they knew for a fact that the "zombies" had gathered? It was completely unclear why they couldn't take the "open" road as well. And these are just the questions that are coming to mind off the top of my head.
2) Why, after so many weeks or months of constantly dealing with danger, did the characters repeatedly, almost spitefully, go off on their own at every turn, apparently never once thinking "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if we watched each other's backs?" How did they live this long? Why did they simply refuse to do logical things like close the damned truck windows? Why did they think it was a better idea to go wandering out in the aforementioned dark where they could be attacked from any side rather than make a defense at a limited access point, like, say, a doorway? I'm not even some zombie movie purist here. I don't spend my days plotting how to survive the zombie apocalypse. These issues were so self-evident that a child who'd never watched a zombie movie would have picked them out. While I do give the filmmakers credit for the reasonably deft technique of starting the movie in media res, that just increased the WTF factor because these are supposedly people who had managed to survive for weeks as the movie starts.
Another minor issue I had was inconsistent audio quality. Sometimes the dialogue was almost impossible to understand clearly. Luckily, I was watching with subtitles because my French is merde.
Review by GreyHunter from the Internet Movie Database.
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