(Originally posted on
Pontypool showed up on my radar screen a few years ago by accident. It was recommended as a ‘zombie movie’–which isn’t entirely incorrect, but isn’t the whole story. My expectations were fairly low since the movie screamed ‘Canadian Indie Film’. As it turns out, this movie is layered in weirdness and is excellent.
The premise is straightforward. The main character Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) drives to work at a local radio station on a snowy morning in Pontypool, Ontario. Grant is a shock jock who has seen better days. On his way in, a woman comes out of the dark and babbles incoherently before disappearing. It’s nicely disconcerting and sets up the whole mood for the film.
Grant’s day only gets weirder as strange events trickle in from the radio station’s reporter and listeners. Pontypool does a great slow burn by using disembodied voices over the radio to paint a picture of something going horribly wrong. The wrongness appears, at first, to be a standard zombie apocalypse. Only after a creepy end to the ‘roving reporter’ does it become apparent that it’s nothing so mundane as walking dead men.
It’s hard to tell much about the nature of the ‘zombies’ without wandering into spoiler territory. Suffice to say that their nature has an otherworldly creepiness to it. They are a manifestation of something alien and hostile that invades language and minds. That’s what makes it Lovecraftian. H.P. would have enjoyed it.
Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) is the station manager who starts out getting pissed at Grant for his antics, only to later look upon him as a source of strength as the insanity grows. Romantic chemistry between the two is low-key, but it works. “Kill is kiss” is a great moment that highlights their attraction and a clever bit of deductive reasoning.
Again, I don’t want to give too much away. The entire movie except for the opening scene of Grant driving to work occurs inside a single room. Details of the disaster come at the audience through verbal presentation. An ingenious–and effective–way of making the most of a small budget. It’s doubly effective since what is happening escapes visual or rational explanation.
For those of you Lovecraft fans who haven’t seen it, the movie is on Netflix. I recommend it unreservedly. I discovered only while researching this that it is based on a book titled Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, which I plan on reading at my earliest opportunity.
