“MadS” Review

While the surface of MadS seems like another horror film trying to match the one-shot wonder of One Cut of the Dead, that would reduce such gritty brilliance. The film is perhaps more notable for being a zombie film that keeps the perspective close and introspective. So many zombie pictures tend to speed towards that point of infection and the violent transformation of humans becoming mindless munching machines. Here’s a movie that sticks with its unfortunate characters as they endure all manner of anxiety and dread amid one wild night of partying.

The following camera lingers on moments that keep getting stranger. In the opening scene, a drugged-up teenager prepares for a night of partying. En route to his house, he encounters a bizarre bleeding woman that is too much of a psychological mess to properly communicate the experiments she was subjected to. All the teen knows is that he’s been covered in blood and doesn’t feel so good. There’s a fearful sensation of wanting to live and avoid trouble, where so much frustration boils over in a quick shower to wash away the blood. As the night goes on, however, the teenager starts getting delrious and hearing laughter. It’s either strong drugs or a zombie infection. Or both. It’s both.

There’s an unpredictable nature to how the events unfold of a zombie apocalypse. Just when the audience thinks they’re going to follow this party animal to the bitter end, the camera shifts over to another character. We stay with the first teen girl protagonist longer, witnessing a fuller effect of the virus before the roaming assault team can gun her down. The camera will then shift to another character as the mad dash continues across the city, trying to find a way to survive and depart from this carnage without a bullet to the brain.

The uncertainty makes this film so much fun to follow. A problem with most zombie films is that once you know the rules, the movie becomes more of a game of spotting when there’s a fumble in the showdown of humans versus zombies. There’s no simplification of this outbreak. We never get a full primer of how victims are infected or what will fully happen to them. We experience bits and pieces as the camera darts around the violence breaking out in the community. From the spewing of the blood to the snapping of their jaws, the infected experience a transformation that is less sudden and more of an evolution. That devotion to compelling the zombie element makes the more intricate scenes of dark streets and brutalized apartment buildings more pleasing.

With a richly mysterious script, the technical expertise of this staging can’t be overstated. For a one-take type of horror, there’s some genius in how the film is framed, moving from close-ups at a party to the wide shots of the city streets to the following of cars and bikes. The complexity alone would be impressive, but the scares evoked from this staging are brilliant. My favorite moment was a zombie bursts through the glass at the exact moment the elevator doors close for a fleeing victim. The young performers all make that tension work by performing an astonishing juggling act of people who go from inebriated party-goers to an existential mess as the end of the world looms.

MadS makes the most of its one-take allure with a stellarly gritty zombie tale that is more about atmosphere than antidotes. Never revealing its track or presenting fully grounded zombie tropes, there’s an excitement in not knowing where this story will go next. It keeps changing as much as the characters, jumping from bitter love triangles to bloody smearings of the infected. There’s enough time spent in this world never to feel so certain about how this zombie infection started or how to solve it. That’s not the point of MadS, centering more on how we’d react to becoming a zombie instead of what strategy we’d form. There’s no way out for these teenagers, where all the drugs in the world can’t fight off that terrifying sensation of everything coming to an end.