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writer: Bertrand Bonello
Casts: Louise Labeque
average rating: 6,9 / 10 star
country: France
genre: Fantasy

"Mixing political commentary, ethnography, teenage melodrama and genre horror, the film is an unashamedly cerebral study of multiple themes – colonialism, revolution, liberalism, racial difference and female desire - with its unconventional narrative structure taking us a journey that’s as intellectually demanding as it is compelling. Bonello takes Haitian history and culture absolutely seriously, and in juxtaposing them with the most exclusively white French experience imaginable..., Zombi Child poses timely and provocative questions. Crisp lensing by Yves Cape, Katia Wyszkop’s design, and music by artists including rapper Damso, plus Bonello himself, combine to make a richly conceived piece. Strong performances from the young cast, including charismatic newcomer Louimat, make this a zombi drama that’s not undead but bracingly alive. " "Instead of overlaying modern-day signifiers on a period piece setting, as he did in House of Pleasures, Zombi Child suggests two temporalities that exist parallel to each other. And the anxiety this creates—through discursive editing and match cuts—leads to a feverish payoff, one that uses genre and supernatural elements to further Bonello’s idea of there being one historical continuity. " Sam Mac, Slant Magazine "Folding history onto itself more explicitly than any of Bonello’s previous films, “Zombi Child” peels back centuries of racist stereotypes to rescue Voodoo from the stuff of black magic and portray it instead as a kind of communion — a communion between spirits, a communion between generations, and a communion between the dislocated joints of an empire. [E]ven the most terrifying scenes are rooted in something real. " David Ehrlich, IndieWire "Bonello’s exquisite use of craft, including poetic day-for-night photography by Yves Cape (Holy Motors) and a strong electro-rock score, is definitely a plus, creating an ambiance that bewitchingly accompanies the action. " Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter "A captivating cinematic experience, Zombi Child is a sorority film about a culture whose members live in the constant presence of death as a result of a powerful and potentially violent link, implicitly referencing topics such as the karma of slavery, the betrayal of values, the loss of memory, the sense of belonging to a community, the power of spirits, myths and reality, the doors of our imagination, etc. These many themes (among others) are very subtly hinted at by Bertrand Bonello from beneath the cloak of what seems to be a modern, girl-focused teen movie but which is actually crossed with a historical film and a semi-ethnographic documentary. It’s a surprising and fascinating mix which will require more than one viewing to reveal all of its earthly secrets. " Fabien Lemercier, Cineuropa "It gets under your skin, with the audacious and cunning mystique of a magician who always has one more trick prepared. Bonello leaves us hypnotised and hungrily begging for more. " Ella Kemp, Little White Lies "[W]hat it has going for it is Bonello’s typically seductive craftsmanship—his way with a suggestive cut or a perfect needle drop. I knew from the prologue, a stretch of hypnotically wordless visual storytelling, that I was back in the hands of a filmmaker who’d make the journey worth taking. " A. A. Dowd, AV Club "The most direct confrontation with the zombie figure, however, could be found in Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, a highlight of the parallel Directors Fortnight section, and indeed of the entire festival. As always with Bonello, the film is both conceptual and visceral as it builds up a dialectical charge between its two storylines and functions equally as a delirious teen-horror reverie, a serious study of the zombie myth, and an open-ended riff on the persistence of the colonial past. " Dennis Lim, ArtForum "Zombi Child is a stirring and highly peculiar piece of work. The Haiti-set sequences are richly atmospheric while sensitive to the material. The horror lies in the zombie’s experience and how it serves as a metaphor for a nation’s history: enslaved, controlled, debased. Yves Cape’s cinematography here is positively stunning. Silvery moonlight, long drapes of shadow, bodies staggering in the dark, sugarcane fields cast in an eerie nocturnal glow. Bonello’s own Tangerine Dream-style score, too, lends the film a crucial nightmarish potency. " Martyn Conterio, CineVue "Zombi Child is the kind of lithe and lucid dream that gets its tendrils round your brain stem, so that when all hell finally breaks loose, you can't jolt yourself awake from its grip. " Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph "Bonello's deep love for genre, his detailed research into the Haitian culture and his handle on the deft art of making you care for his characters results in a poetic and incredibly moving film. " Kathryn McLaughlin, SciFi Now "Zombi Child is suspenseful and watchable thanks to impressively sublime uses of lighting and colour, a contrast between earnest teen girl romantic fantasy and arch humour and bursts of pop music. It all culminates in a wildly flamboyant finale, but the shift to standard horror mode ends up being the movie's biggest shock. " Kevin Ritchie, Now "intillating... “Zombi Child” is fueled by insinuation and fascination. " Glenn Kenny, The New York Times "In his latest film, Zombi Child, Bertrand Bonello complements his usual emphasis on aesthetics with an insightful critique of colonialism and the contradictions of liberalism. Far from clinical or scholarly, however, Zombi Child is teeming with vivid hangout scenes and brilliant slices of life... it is these moments that make the revelations visceral rather than didactic. " Forrest Cardamenis, Hyperallergic "French director Bertrand Bonello’s experimental horror film dazzles through unconventional storytelling and an electrifying score. “Zombi Child” is a rollercoaster to watch as it clashes together narrative themes, social topics and variations on lighting and music. It’s inventive, it’s lively … it’s cool. " Alexandra Bentzien, Washington Square News "It’s compelling, entertaining, and ends on terrific sequence after terrific sequence. " Joey Magidson, Awards Circuit "[A]n engaging and political piece of cinema. " Brianna Zigler, Screen Queens "After his exquisite “Nocturama”, Bertrand Bonello returns with another raw, inclusive and accurate take on Millennials’ perspectives and behavior. Blending mysticism, social commentary, environmental issues, horror and teen drama, Bonello scores another goal with this efficient, Gothic-infused coming-of-age story. Mysteriously seductive, it depicts the strong and ambiguous bond of a group of girls forming a special club where they reveal their most dark secrets in order to prove loyalty. Their newest member is a Haitian refugee still in process of adaptation. The story connects past and present, the zombified culture in Haiti, its devastating earthquake, victims and survivors, the current refugee situation in Europe, all seen through the girls’ experiences. A powerful statement on prejudice and the quest for freedom and acceptance, Bonello extracts wickedly fascinating performances from the young cast, while guiding the audience through a haunting experience. " Roger Costa, Brazilian Press "Bertrand Bonello's bifurcated drama explores the allure of the exotic, and how strongly we may wish that the most far-fetched and fantastical of stories might be true after all. With exceptional cinematography by Yves Cape, the zombie flashbacks are dramatized in an almost documentary fashion, which frankly makes them more horrifying. " David Morgan, CBS News "With Zombi Child, Bertrand Bonello has made a film that tries to reclaim the zombie’s classic roots. Returning in it are mystic voodoo tropes and evil voodoo masters, which haven’t really been seen in the genre since its pre-Romero heydays (outside of The Serpent and the Rainbow). But rather than merely being an update of White Zombie and its ilk, Zombi Child takes a postmodern, historical bent that makes the movie into something a whole lot more. Zombi Child ends strongly, telling a powerful story of generational trauma, and re-codifying the meaning of the zombie for new thematic resonance. That the entire movie preceding is gorgeous to look at and poetic in its movements is an easy bonus. " JM Mutore, "With "Zombi Child" [Bonello] takes a genre and blows it to smithereens by mashing horror with voodoo, teen coming-of-age, and, of course, the ever-popular zombie thriller. Bonello effectively tackles themes such as freedom, slavery and white privilege. And the final 20 minutes are absolutely riveting including the use of an unexpected but effective classic show tune at the very end. " Frank J. Avella, EDGE Media Network "Like his other recent films, “Zombi Child” looks and sounds beautiful, lush, and immersive – writer-directors this intellectually ambitious are rarely such seductive stylists as well... film is thrilling to watch, because it truly feels like anything is possible as Bonello teases different directions the film might head. “Zombi Child” is the rare film that’s both rich in ideas and fun, a reckoning with forces colonial powers would like buried, but that won’t stay dead. " Joe Blessing, The Playlist "It is a film that breaths, letting each detail marinate in an audience member’s mind, allowing for the film’s elements to be fully fleshed out, creating an unique experience for audiences" Stephanie Archer, Film Inquiry "Bertrand Bonello’s latest film ‘Zombi Child’ is a haunting tale of colonialism and faith in a higher power of any kind. [P]repare yourself for a deep and dark look into the roots of slavery in the past 60 years of human history, as well as the modern ways we still treat Black people in France and beyond. Vital barely begins to cover it. " Liam Haber, The Knockturnal "Whether or not you catch on to the meaning of its warped and spellbinding climax, Zombi Child meritoriously wields slow-burn for an electrifying payoff. Zombi Child marches to an innocuous and bone-chilling beat before unfurling its tapestry of the sacred, absurd, and tragic. But counterbalancing its nuttiness is an ending that represents recovery, the finalization of humanity restored. " Caroline Cao, Slash Film "{T]his is a genre-blending horror satire on the country’s racial divisions that delves into the country’s post-colonial heritage and the myth of Haitian zombie legend. " Ed Frankl, The Film Stage "[E]erie and entrancing.... " Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AV Club "Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello blends his singular style with his fascination with voodoo for an exceptional film. " Kathleen Sachs, Chicago Reader "sential, subversive and devilishly clever. " Michael Smith, White City Cinema "Bonello proves that he’s among the highest order of working filmmakers, a director so sure of his hand that he’s able to walk the tightest of ropes, weaving together narratives both intimate and cosmic, into something that is as provocative as it is sincere and emotionally shattering. " Joshua Brunsting, Criterion Cast "ZOMBI CHILD is a gorgeously realized, deftly constructed, genuinely thought-provoking, highly empathetic film buoyed by the nuanced, powerhouse performances by Labèque, Louimat and Milfort. (All three should soon be inundated with rich roles, if there’s any justice in the world. )" Shawn Macomber, Rue Morgue "Zombi Child throws out all conventions and makes you think, as opposed to make you scream. Once you get to the core, though, the creep factor slowly leaks out and grabs you by the throat. Bonello entwines the history with horror in unconventional ways, using social commentary and innuendo like a master. " Corey Danna, Horror Geek Life.

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...

At the very center of French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child is the story of a Haitian man named Clairvius Narcisse, who dies suddenly in 1962 and is brought back to life, if that’s what you’d call it, as a zombie. This was not exactly done with his permission. He is in fact but one of a handful of undead; like these other men, he has lost his ability to speak. Other functions persist: he can hear, move, see. And he can work—something we learn once Narcisse is forced onto a sugarcane plantation, which is apparently according to plan. Labor—not flesh-eating hijinks—was the point all along. This is a fascinating story on its own terms: a depiction of enslavement that captures the soul-destroying nature of that institution too aptly for its surreal elements to feel like mere legend or metaphor, but too strangely for them feel like anything else. Narcisse was a real man, though Zombi Child isn‘t at all a strict retelling of his story. Neither was the last movie to invoke Narcisse’s legend: Wes Craven’s 1988 film The Serpent and the Rainbow, an adaptation of anthropologist Wade Davis’s book of the same name, which detailed his time investigating Narcisse’s case. Bonello has little in common with Craven. But they share a playful attitude toward pop conventions—and Bonello is especially keen to experiment with telling multiple stories at once. Or, maybe more accurately, to take one story and split it multiple ways. His films at times seem imitative of mitosis: split narratives bubbling outward into yet more binaries and splits, whether they’re leaps back and forth in time or place or alternating narrative lines between characters. When this works, it works. The climax of Bonello’s recent biopic Saint Laurent, for example, explodes into an outright Mondrian painting, with the screen itself splitting into myriad rectangular blocks… while also juggling frequent flash-forwards to the end of Saint Laurent’s life, a period in his biography that we had only begun to visit in the second half of the movie. (See what I mean? ) The split-screen chaos of the film’s end is a nod to the De Stijl pioneer‘s most iconic paintings, to be sure, and for compelling reasons: Mondrian was a favorite of Saint Laurent. But it’s also Bonello going full Bonello, advancing a brazen link between Mondrian’s experimentation and his own playfully abstract style—with a wink. One of the amusingly consistent results of this strategy is that I’ve only ever loved half of a Bonello movie—more specifically, half of each film’s splintering, vacillating halves. There usually comes a point in each when my interest in the project rises and wanes from scene to scene. Zombi Child is unsurprisingly on brand, but that’s not a bad thing. It isn’t just the story of Narcisse. When it isn’t trekking the eerie cruelties of zombie slavery in 1962, it’s offering us an extended hang with the preppy-cool girls of modern day France—in particular a young black woman named Mélissa, who, like Narcisse, hails from Haiti. Mélissa ( Wislanda Louimat) is a survivor of the 2010 earthquake. Her parents and much of the rest of her family were not so fortunate. She thankfully has a few remnants of her old life with her in France, mostly by way of religion: her aunt Katy ( Katiana Milfort), who looks after her, is a mambo, or priestess of the Haitian voodoo religion, who among other things is responsible for bringing news to the dead. Katy worries that Mélissa is at risk of forgetting her past. This, as it turns out—for reasons I won’t detail—may not be such a risk. Nor is there the social isolation one might expect. Mélissa has made a friend, Fanny ( Louise Labeque), who invites her to join her sorority, a small circle of fellow-students whose main concern is whether Mélissa, who likes music that sounds strange to their ears and makes odd groaning noises in her sleep, is “cool or weird. ” Really, she’s both—like Fanny herself, who spends much of the movie falling head-over-heels with a boy that we only see in her fantasies. Taken together, the two storylines of Haiti in 1962 and modern day France at first seemed like an unusual pair of subjects for Bonello—until I remembered that, for one thing, the gleaming inner history of capital, in which slavery and colonialism of course play a crucial part, is of continued interest for this filmmaker. And in the first place, every Bonello film feels like an unusual topical swerve from what came before. His last film Nocturama, for example, tracks a roving, multi-racial crew of young terrorist-activists as they commit heinously violent acts and wait out the police in a shut-down mall. One of the stickier points of that film is that these youths seem altogether ideology-free—until they’re in that mall, which stokes an unshaken fascination with capital. Nocturama ’s resistance to ascribing clear political intention to the group’s violence made it hard for people to make sense of its relationship to that violence. Less generously, it seemed to mask the relative shallowness of the film’s own ideas. Zombi Child is better. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired similar complaints. Bonello’s filmmaking attracts, maybe even courts, hand-wringing about its seeming sense of remove from his subjects. It’s an easy enough complaint to make sense of: Bonello is an observer. He has a penchant for slow, lateral tracking shots that take in every scene as a scene: more than merely dramatize, his images tend to evoke and explore the social atmosphere. They get to know the joint. His drifting, dreaming medium shots knowingly run the risk of laminating and containing, rather than plainly depicting, what’s happening in a scene—which must be what inspires the consistent criticism that his movies can leave you a little cold. I don’t find Bonello cold. I find him alert, alive, and frequently inspired—if unexpectedly limited, at times. Zombi Child amounts to a curiously fragmented display of his talent. But much of the good stuff is here. For example, his knack for making the objects populating peoples’ lives—cell phones in Zombi Child, department store mannequins in Nocturama —feel cynically complicit in their personalities and desires. His scenes, meanwhile, don’t play out in mere rooms: every major locale feels like an environment. One of the best moments in Saint Laurent makes the sight of two men cruising in a Paris club feel all-encompassing, as if everyone and everything else in the scene were live ingredients in the mens’ mutual desire. The details matter. In Zombi Child, a quick moment in which a young woman idly takes a selfie is, on the one hand, as straightforward as it looks; on the other, it’s a gesture that seems to summarize her entire world. Not the world of the movie: her world. Bonello zeroes in on these moments while at the same time powering past ellipses and fragments in his psychological portraits of his characters. His through-lines swivel. He works in familiar genres— Saint Laurent is indisputably a biopic; Zombi Child hits more of its marks as a zombie movie than at first appears likely—but in his hands, the rituals of genre feel like mere scaffolding. He has his own interests. Zombi Child risks becoming an assortment of funky observations, singular moments, put to middling use. This has happened to Bonello before. I had little real affection for this movie until about half-way through—that old problem again. Because that’s when Zombi Child bends toward something sticky and interesting. The shift comes with the addition of a new character, who provokes an unexpected (but, for Bonello, expectable) structural split, kick-starting something worthy, finally, of the film’s unruffled mysteriousness. And the rest spills out, curiously and frighteningly, from there. What induces Zombi ’s brief pivot to greatness in its latter half is an unexpected favor that gets asked and carried out—a risky and ill-advised endeavor that clarifies much of what the film has to say about history, capital, and middle-class French identity. It gets thrilling, riding the knife’s edge of terror and discomfiting silliness. And it goes further into Haiti’s myths and rituals than I expected of the film, while laudably drumming up unexpectedly fraught, uncomfortable reasons for doing so. I watch Bonello’s movies with the keen sense that I’m in the hands of an artist laboring hard to engineer this sense of contradiction and conflict. It’s also true that I can too often feel that engineering creaking under the floorboards of his films. But for Zombi Child, as for much of Bonello’s work, that frustration is precisely what proves enticing—even if it's only worth it half the time. More Great Stories from Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair ’s 2020 Hollywood cover is here with Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez & more — Who would defend Harvey Weinstein? — Oscar nominations 2020: what went wrong —and did anything go right? — Greta Gerwig on the lives of Little Women —and why “male violence” isn’t all that matters — Jennifer Lopez on giving her all to Hustlers and breaking the mold — How Antonio Banderas changed his life after nearly losing it — From the Archive: A look at the J. Lo phenomenon Looking for more? 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( 2) 6. 1 1h 42min 2019 Haiti, 1962. A man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In Paris, 55 years later, at the prestigious Légion d’honneur boarding school, a Haitian girl confesses an old family secret to a group of new friends—with unthinkable consequences. Rentals include 30 days to start watching this video and 48 hours to finish once started. Included with MUBI on Amazon for £7. 99/month after trial By ordering or viewing, you agree to our Terms. Sold by Amazon Digital UK Limited. |.