Pontypool

The Grand River Film Festival this year is opening with Pontypool, the Canadian psychological horror that debuted in theatres last September. I thought this something of a bizarre choice for an opener given the cannibalistic nature of the subject material, but on further reflection it seems right at home nestled amidst the morbid cornucopia of films offered by the festival this year, films such as Krabat and An American Crime. Pontypool has received a great deal of international press, mostly due to it's popular dubbing as the "smart zombie film."

I actually saw Pontypool back in July after hearing about it on CBC Radio Edmonton (you can download the segment here). The movie is set in the small Ontario town of Pontypool, where radio personality Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is slumming as an early-morning DJ for 660 CLSY: The Beacon, after being fired from several big-city gigs. Starting the day like any other, Grant, his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), and their technician Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) begin receiving reports from their traffic reporter that a violent mob has gathered around a local doctor's practice.

The reports become progressively more disturbing, with descriptions of rioters who have stripped naked and appear to be killing and eating other townsfolk. Mazzy and Briar are convinced this all just a War of The Worlds-esque joke until a military transmission interrupts their broadcast to warn residents to stay indoors and "avoid the English language." Elements of the English language, they discover, have become virulent, affecting low-level functions in the brain and turning people into what are essentially living zombies. Any fans of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" will be right at home with the idea.

 Pontypool's Grant Mazzy, played by Stephen McHattie

Pontypool is directed by Bruce McDonald, the Canadian director who won Best Canadian Feature Film at the 1989 TIFF for Roadkill, and who's 2007 The Tracey Fragments, featuring Canadian film darling Ellen Page (who also stars in An American Crime), was nominated for a plethora of Genies. As an aside I thought The Tracey Fragments was pretty solid, even if at times it was, to quote a friend, "a little too post-modern."

Pontypool instilled in me a sense of unease and even a little paranoia from the get-go. The movie relies heavily on close-up camera work and tends to have only a single character as a focal point, making for an experience as intimate as it is claustrophobic. McDonald never provides the viewer with a chance to sit back, take it all in and put the pieces together. As viewers we're put into a visual environment that mirrors the uncertainty and confinement of the film's characters. The result is something pleasantly unsettling that does not rely on excessive gore or cheap scares to frighten the audience, and I found it a really quite refreshing change of pace from the flagging formulas followed by recent horror films.

Pontypool actually played against my expectations of genre to add a further level of anxiety to the movie. I spent most of the movie cringing at every static-filled call-in and abrupt camera shift, waiting to hear a live caller being gruesomely dismembered or to see a flood of infected people burst into the church in "Dawn of The Dead" fashion. Without giving too much away, my expectations for convention were pleasantly foiled.

The only major disappointment in Pontypool may be that, for a movie continually praised for being "smart," towards the end I felt that it tried to be too smart for its own good. At a certain key part a new character shows up at the church by coming through an open window (seriously) with what seems to be the exclusive purpose of explaining what is going on. The explanation offered is a weird mixture of metaphysics and linguistic buzzwords that seem as implausible as they are abrupt. Explanation given, the character departs through a window out into the street (really) and is never heard from again. I can't lie when I say it pained me to have an hour of enjoyable creepiness ruined by that heavy-handed interlude, and it really kind of killed the end of the movie for me. That being said, the first hour of enjoyable creepiness is absolutely worth seeing the movie for alone. Ending be damned, Pontypool is just an enjoyable, refreshing piece of psychological horror.

Pontypool is showing at the Grand River Film Festival on Thursday, October 22nd at 7:30pm for the Opening Gala (tickets are $90) at the Cambridge Galaxy Cinema. If you decide to fork out the ninety bucks, according to the GRFF webiste you'll also have, among other things, the opportunity to meet Tony Burgess, who wrote the script for the movie as well as the book, "Pontypool Changes Everything," that the film is based on.

If you don't want to shell out a hundred bucks to see Pontypool on Thursday night, it's also showing on Saturday, October 24th at the Gig Music Hall in Kitchener for a more affordable $7.