PONTYPOOL @ 15

Disgraced shock jock Grant Mazzy drives into work at his nowheresville radio station, arguing with his agent. His car is approached by a woman who is trying to say something but can't quite get her mouth around the words. She bashes her head against the passenger window and then disappears into the blizzard. Rattled, Grant drives on to his night shift gig, bickering with his producer and drizzling sarcasm over everything presented to him as news. But then the reports start going strange. There is a hostage situation. Herds of people gather to destroy cars and buildings. Even the BBC has heard tell of the strange events in the tiny Canadian town. If you've seen enough zombie films you are already guessing about this one. Then again, when we see the first symptom as it begins we wonder about that, too. A local theatre company comes in for a guest spot to sing a song from their cringey musical and one of the girls goes dead eyed and can't finish a word, repeating the sound prah over and over. The station receives government advice that includes avoiding the English language and even translating the French text. It's going to be a long and strange night.

Pontypool arrived under the radar in the late 2000s, I don't remember it from the MIFF program from that or the next year and the art houses that might have given it a screen were in the last stages of their lives in Melbourne. Like REC or Martyrs, I could only see this popping up repeatedly in overseas DVD retailers' pages. What I would do was simply wait until the prices fell and do a smash and grab click fest. Of those mentioned in this paragraph the only one I didn't screen at Shadows was Martyrs (it's a masterpiece but not for everybody). For the Pontypool screening I chose a cold Friday night when the host Milos brought out extended heating and we collected a decent turnout for a cold weather event. It went down a storm.

It generally does. I think the reason is that while it telescopes its narrative points from the word go (an arch monologue of wordplay spoken by Mazzy in a prerecord) it reveals them sparingly until the terrible truth comes out. It's no great spoiler to say that the cause of the violent zombie outbreaks is a language-borne virus which will require something a lot more sophisticated that a shot to the skull to defeat it. Do they defeat it? A post credit sequence (which annoyed me until I finally got what it referred to from earlier in the film) makes its own suggestion.

As arcane as it might seem this film does deliver as a horror movie. On the one hand the sense of apocalyptic doom mounting is worrisome and the localised violence is a grim proof of threat for the infected. And this is the point to talk about the staging. Apart from a very few outdoor shots, this whole story is told within the snowbound radio station with accounts of the atrocities and weirder developments almost entirely relayed through spoken accounts. For any other story this might feel stagey and cheap but when your threat is all about language and its dangers it feels gratifying that we hear rather than see most of the action. There is a clear sense that Grant and his coworkers are helpless to stop the carnage. Also, it means that when the horde makes it to the station, Night of the Living Dead style, everything we've learned is about to squeeze our people to the wall.

The station itself is all localised light and manipulated communication as voice feeds are variously opened and closed, advice given or ignored. What is happening with conversation is what happens in the greater world but in highly concentrated form. As each of us is unto ourselves a centre of information feeds the whole building is, here, and the players must negotiate its flow with a sense of urgency. Taking the action outdoors for big set pieces would shrink the enormity of the situation and trivialise the story.

And then you have a cast that keeps your eyes and ears on them. Lisa Houle's long suffering and patience-stretched producer shows what she has already gone through to keep this big city prima donna in his exiled state. Georgina Reilly is full of knowing pep as the assistant engineer. B ut it is the mountainously cragged Stephen McHattie who must shoulder the weight of the end of the world as fallen star Grant Mazzy.  His face is a constantly shifting display of one who has learned to say one thing with his mouth and its opposite with his eyes. With his radio perfect gravel and balm voice  and his urbane stetson-ed confidence he keeps us where he wants us for the entire time. The DVD I bought includes a radio play version which you might think would go even further than the film being constrained to the audio realm but (having not heard it) I would miss McHattie's double-thinking performance. He does the most out of all the elements of this movie to keep it cinematic.

So, fifteen years on, does it stand? Well, it was released at the dawn of social media and over a decade prior to the pandemic which applied hot and steroidal compresses to the use of language in tweet form, video bite, memes and gif animations. The world has exploded its communications and rendered the least qualified claims on everything from vaccines to climate change appear equally valid with the science, rendering the expanded opportunities of communication into a maelstrom of bullshit in which it only gets harder to find and promote the value of provable reality. What would a language virus make of a world that has already described itself  as post-truth? Would it give up and go find a market where it might at least be noticeable? Maybe the time for a genre wonder like Pontypool has been defeated by its future. But maybe, also, the solution reached through desperation by these remaining few might be worth considering. It is a confusing solution and it involves a lot of muscular self-contradiction but it did work for them. Or did it?

Pontypool is hard to find at time of writing (both dvd and blu-ray releases seem to have fallen from all catalogues) but you could try YouTube or keep your eye on the local streamers (it was available breifly through SBS on Demand). If you come across it, give it a big loving spin.