French director Dominique Rocher’s introspective zombie
film, based on the homonymous novel by Pit Agarmen, opens with electronic music
that is subtly reminiscent of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” (1978) soundtrack,
as if to subliminally indicate the road it will venture into.
To revisit the 28 Days Later/Last man on Earth trope, of an
isolated man who is apparently the final survivor of a zombie plague, Rocher
drops Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), a French/Norwegian musician, at his
ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Paris, during a party. As he avoids the scene and
looks for his left-behind belongings, Sam locks himself in a room and falls
asleep. The following morning he wakes up to find an empty place with blood spattered
walls and a city in ruins, abandoned… except for the corpses that walk the
streets attacking the last few survivors left, as they try to escape.
Upon first impression, it seems like just another piece of
the same old, same old, reanimated-corpses –versus-survivors story, with Paris
as a backdrop being the only variation upon the theme.
Fortunately, Rocher has a
better plan (and source). Far from focusing on the usual fare of gore and
violence, his intention, as in Romero’s saga of the dead’s best moments, is to delve
deep inside human nature and upon an individual’s reaction to an extreme
situation.
Just like in “Dawn of the Dead”, Sam tries to adjust and slowly
“normalize” his life. Shut inside the building, rationing the food he gathers
from empty apartments, making music with household utensils and confessing his
thoughts to one of the infected (Denis Lavant), which he keeps locked in an
elevator.
As the world outside crumbles, life for Sam becomes a safe
routine that eerily mirrors our current way of life and the level of
complacency we have reached as a society. Every day and in multiple ways, the
world as we know it is being dismantled, ravaged around us, and, as if nothing
were happening, we go about our lives, somnambulists holding a small rectangle
in front of us, repeating the same actions, again and again, blind to the
apocalypse that surrounds us.
During one of his monologues, Sam realizes reality has
shifted, and that the concept of normality in relation to human existence depends
solely on the point of view. “Being dead is the norm now. I am the abnormal
one”, he utters to his dead “friend”.
Belonging to a collective hive mind, with a sole instinctive
governing act, infinitely repeating the same actions, to the edge of madness.
Is that what we call normal? Rocher asks.
Through an unexpected plot twist, Sam is confronted with his
newfound lifestyle and his inevitable adaptation to his surroundings. His fall
into comfort. A possibility of transforming his situation makes him question
his stagnation and pushes him towards facing his crushing fear of change.
In a genre that has been, in the last couple of decades, over-exploited
ad nauseam, Rocher takes a risk, with a quiet, artistic and philosophical
vision that eschews cheap clichés, to expose the truly horrifying issues (apathy,
conformism, solitude) of a society, that has become a pathetic parody of
itself, lacking humanity, condemned to mechanically repeat itself, and conformed
by desensitized individuals that wander the world, savagely devouring each
other.
Manuel Ríos Sarabia