Zombi Child

ZOMBI CHILD - Ad Vitam

Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child is the quintessential metaphorical representation of both eating too much than one can swallow, and starving itself to the point of death. It is a breathtakingly shot and well-performed film that is ultimately brought down by its lack of focus on storytelling and a genuinely poor ability at chaining its events from one to another, and ultimately making cohesive sense of all the events that took place. The concept of parallel storytelling is taken way too seriously here as Bonello does not bother to link the ongoing Plot A and Plot B narrative by any meaningful way possible. Made more frustrating when Plot A, a storyline about two teenage girls living in the aftermath of harrowing events, is given much more significant screentime than the latter more dense narrative of Plot B.

It could be taken as an understandable defence when one says that the reason Plot A forms itself to a more intriguing and stable degree is because it has more character events than the lingeringly mysterious events of Plot B. Plotting that defence is also a clueless nature of one's ambiguity of the subtext behind the events of Plot B. These subtexts and allusions that are the conclusion of the story of Zombi child is one that is lost in the one fundamental rule of visual filmmaking and that is show, do not tell. That rule is not concrete in filmmaking, sometimes verbal exposition can be even more exciting than visual exposition, as proved by the filmography of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Ingmar Bergman.

Then again, in films of this enigmatic direction, an interesting plot negates over an exciting one. Whatever may be replaced by a significant background event is mostly on equal terms of being philosophically or entertainingly rich, as that of the foreground event, but that is not the case with this film. The foreground plot would be much better as a conclusive epilogue to the story of the background events, than being an unnecessary medium of telling the story that could have been promptly presented. This choice also affects two substantial aspects of its technicality: the acting and the cinematography.

The acting is the one that is affected the most, while Bonello shows an impressive talent at directing a younger cast than many of his contemporary peers, he wastes talents of his main leads Louise Labeque and Wislanda Louimat by not giving their characters a significant connection that proves their entitlement of being the films central characters. This problem is most significant with Louise Labeque's character of Fanny, as her character seems to be existing in an even more unnecessarily diverging Plot C, that appears out of nowhere halfway through the film, and tries to circle the significant event in the most laughable and tonally inconsistent way possible. An aspect that ultimately renders her character useless and unnecessary for the bigger picture. A crying shame, as mountain-like potential wasted for an insignificant molehill in the character of Fanny and performance from Louise.

ZOMBI CHILD - Ad Vitam

The second aspect that is ruined by the narrative shortcomings is the cinematography by Yves Cape. Cape manages to capture the ominous tone of Plot A and Plot B narratives beautifully but is clearly at his best when he is shooting the forests, streets, and mountains of 1962 Haiti than he is at shooting regular corridors and hall rooms of a modern-day French boarding school. The shots in Haiti are much more open, mysterious, creepy, beautiful, tense, and fitting to the music prepared by Bonello than that of the bland white classrooms or typical looking hallways of a wealthy but ultimately boring looking French Highschool. Even much more lively places in the modern setting like that of the house of Katiana Milfort's Mambo Katy and the dorm bathroom are still not as beautiful or tense as of the aforementioned Haiti locations, and when considering the narrative misstep, it does not seem worth it in the end either.

Zombi Child starves for cohesiveness and yet eats way too much visual time on lingering nothing, that it is almost cinematically diabetical. Now cohesiveness, culmination of events, and clear cut narrative chaining is not an essential aspect in every type of film, hell, some movies like that of David Lynch and Spike Jonze, proud themselves on breaking these boundaries of satisfaction in order to serve a deep, philosophical, and sometimes even entertaining piece of media that are outside of the boundaries of human simplicity.

Neither profound, nor philosophical, nor is it entertaining. It has a simple plot stretched to its ultimate breaking point. Its philosophy is much more cultural and avert to its tone that the choice of making it this much ominous feels overwhelmingly stupid, and just like how 2017 horror-dud Veronica overestimates its potential at scaring its audience, this film overestimates the emotional/omnicity of its narrative. Which is a shame, because of what one sees of the events of Haiti, it could have made into a fantastic short film that could have possibly dethroned Paul Thomas Andreson's Anima and Jonathan Glazer's The Fall as the year's best.

Zombi Child is released January 24th 2020