Zombi Child

Zombi Child blends voodoo, boarding school, pretty women, and some sort of avant-garde horror into a daub of mediocrity, painting in broad, superficial strokes that look pretty but ultimately amount to nothing of value. It tells two disconnected stories (or at least, that's what writer/director Bertrand Bonello wants you to think): one of a reanimated man forced to work in sugar plantations, and another of a young, high-school girl trying to fit into boarding school while pining for her boyfriend. The film lacks any tension, dramatic or otherwise; although being touted as a horror film it lacks suspense; and it lacks an engaging storyline and characters, making the almost two-hour film really feel its runtime.

Zombi Child suffers from various problems, although not all at once. It starts off promising, setting up the two storylines quite well with vivid imagery and fantastic cinematography. Almost immediately after, however, the endgame becomes painfully obvious and the rest of the film is merely a slog to that point, watching teen girls be angsty and sighing while speaking to each other in hushed tones under muted sepia lights. The writing is painfully lacklustre, with dialogue woefully inadequate and characters chewing the scenery more than anything else at any given time. Lack of dialogue doesn't bother me; after all, Beanpole does a fantastic job with sparse dialogue; however, the sparse dialogue in Zombi Child, designed to come off as artistic, only presents itself as shallow and vapid.

Unlike The Wave, however, Zombi Child is not a complete loss of cinema. The film works best when it completely gives itself up to the legend, with the mysterious, occult scenes where voodoo is performed a highlight in cinematography. The acting is brilliant: both women (Louise Labeque and Wislanda Louimat) perform admirably in the spotlight, doing the best with what they're given: Labeque playing the vapid, love-lorn teenager filled with angst and hormones, and Louimat playing what appears to be the only person of colour in the film.

The final third of the movie is its saving grace, with beautiful cinematography and displays of Haitian (or is it voodoo?) culture that almost make the slog through the first two-thirds worth it.

Zombi Child could have been so much more if it had focussed its attentions on the tale it was trying to tell. It wastes its time talking high-school romance and pining for faraway lovers, when it could have been trying to build interest and suspense. It also might have helped if we, the audience, weren't aware of how things were going to turn out in the first ten minutes or so. In fact, it might have been better if Zombi Child had been two movies: one exploring the life of a man returned from the grave and forced into slavery, and one where a young woman does everything in her power to keep herself together after her love falls apart.

Instead, what we have is two halves of slightly under-baked pies struggling to be one. I mean, I'd eat it, but I think I'd enjoy it a lot more if it had been something else. At least it looks pretty.

The director himself has said Zombi Child is a "horror" movie, but I think this is really true only in the most literal sense. Bonello filmed much of the movie on ___location in Haiti and the rest, presumably, in France. This fact of production - filming scenes that take place in 1962 Haiti, and some that take place in a contemporary Haiti which doesn't seem to have changed much; and filming most of the movies contemporary moments in modern France - encapsulates the movie's thematic intent. The latter are firmly rooted in colonialism, the ongoing legacy of slavery, and the cultural dialectic between assimilationism and the fierce preservation of traditionalism (arguably, two different kinds of survival, which is also a core theme: surviving the multi-generational damage of colonial )oppression.

If this all sounds deep, it is. This is a brief film, around 85 minutes, and the first 60 contain very little of what could be considered horror in the sense of "horror movie." The horror in the first two thirds of the movie is purely thematic and a historical. It isn't until the last part of the movie where Zombi Child's oversimplified classification of a horror movie becomes evident. In other words, those going into this movie looking for a traditional zombie flick are likely to be disappointed. It's really more of a drama in which certain horror elements come into play, but almost purely as metaphor.

Although the last twenty minutes are breathless, the introduction languishes and lasts about eighty minutes. Thus, in order to appreciate the very ending, you'll have to be patient... very patient...

Yes, true to the old style zombies this movie just trudges along. A '60s Haitian worker decades earlier in the storyline is purposefully given Pufferfish tetrodotoxin with an abrading additive through his skin. He dies, sort of, perhaps just heart rate suspension, anyway he's buried then dug up to work as slave "Zombie" style labor in a sugar plantation. Decades later a young female relative is in a French school where she tells the tale of voodoo practice in Haiti which eventually plays into turning our storyline into a "misadventure". Lots of jumping back 'n' forth between the two locations/periods. Good accuracy in the basic narrative, but drags & ending is a little weird.

Beginning in Haiti in the early sixties, "Zombi Child" deals with voodoo and is one of the best and most poetic horror films in many a moon. It is obvious from the title and the setting that we are meant to think of a much earlier film with a similar setting but that would appear to be where the comparisons with Jacques Tourneur's "I Walked with a Zombie" ends for in the next scene we are in comtemporary France and a group of schoolgirls are being taught French history in a very white classroom.

What follows is a deliciously unsettling movie that manages to encompass the pains of teenage romance with a tale of the 'undead' as a metaphor for colonialism and it actually works. I can't think of too many examples in recent cinema where two opposing themes have been as beautifully united as they are here. In some ways it's closer to something like "The Neon Demon" or the recent remake of "Suspiria" than it is to Val Lewton. Here is a film with a creeping sense of dread, (we've all seen films in which schoolgirls are not as sweet as they appear to be), and the grand guignol finale is as spooky as a good horror movie should be. It also confirms director Bertrand Bonello as one of the most exciting talents working anywhere today.