zombies

Atlantics (2019)

André Crous

Migration, an arranged marriage and zombies form the backbone of Atlantics, all under the ominous glow of an unfinished megatower in Dakar.

AtlanticsSenegal
3.5*

Director:
Mati Diop
Screenwriters:
Mati Diop
Olivier Demangel
Director of Photography:
Claire Mathon

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Atlantique

Resembling something straight out of Metropolis, Muejiza reaches into the sky like the Tower of Babel. It is still unfinished, but those working on the construction site are very unhappy – and with good reason. The developer, Mr. N’Diaye, hasn’t paid them in months. They have girlfriends or families to support, but Mr. N’Diaye is out of reach. They can’t wait any longer, and by nightfall, a group of them take a boat out to Spain. Within days, news reaches their community in Dakar that all of them have perished at sea.

One of the people hardest hit by the news is Ada (Mama Sané). Barely out of school, she was secretly seeing the dashing but now-late Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré). Their relationship was a secret because she is promised to Omar, a wealthy young Senegalese man working in Italy. But her mind is clearly elsewhere, and by the time her wedding night rolls around, her white nuptial bed bursts into flames. Not out of passion but, according to one police investigator, because of spontaneous combustion.

The policeman in charge of this apparent case of arson is Issa, who is around the same age as Souleiman. His boss, the commissioner, refers to him as a “young star”, though his investigative techniques leave us wondering whether he ever received any training. For some reason, he quickly suspects Souleiman of having survived, returned to Dakar, infiltrated the wedding party and set his girlfriend’s bed alight, all incognito. He is so adamant about this theory that he goes straight to Souleiman’s parents’ house, where he tells the grieving mother her son is still alive and has likely committed a crime. None of this endears him to the viewer. But there is something else that is weird. He keeps sweating so much that he collapses. This happens very often around sunset.

Soon enough, we see what all of this means. Halfway through the film, a group of women show up at the mansion belonging to Mr. N’Diaye and demand the three months of wages. Their eyes are all white as an oval moon. They are zombies, although we have seen some of them before among the living. Why these women, in particular, are the vessels for those who drowned at sea is left unexplained. Clearly, they represent the tens of thousands of women who are left behind in Senegal while men make the hazardous journey across the ocean to try their luck in Europe. But then, Issa also becomes a zombie and channels the departed Souleiman.

Again, we don’t get any explanation for why Issa serves as a vessel for Souleiman, nor is it evident why he is the only man to take on such a role. Most likely, the director wanted to avoid girl-on-girl intimacy at the film’s climax, but the screenplay suffers mightily because of this inconsistency and lack of a proper explanation. What makes it all the more confusing is that Issa had already started collapsing before his involvement in Ada’s case.

While the film has a certain charm about it, it leaves the viewer with many questions that are never answered. Ada and Souleiman spend very little time together before his fateful departure, and their interaction is limited. Souleiman doesn’t let Ada know when he leaves, so perhaps he didn’t view the relationship as anything substantive. This makes it difficult to empathise with Ada, whose melancholy persists for most of the film. And almost all of her best friends who come to the wedding are shocked to learn that she doesn’t really care for her new husband. Hadn’t she ever spoken to them before? In addition, there is also zero chemistry between her and Omar, and we get no hint of an explanation for their marriage.

Atlantics is full of images of the ocean that remind us again and again of the tide rolling out with boats of migrants and, presumably, rolling back in with the spirits of the dead. And the film does a wonderful lo-fi job with mirrors, while the grotesque, conspicuous tower is very realistically rendered through CGI. But the screenplay is seriously flawed with almost no backstory to the main characters and very little development of some major peripheral characters.

This is a memorable and ambitiously staged (though problematic) depiction of the consequences migration has on those who are left behind. Diop shows herself to be a very able filmmaker, but in the future, she would be wise to wait until the screenplay is ready before starting production. 

Planet Terror (2007)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter: 
Robert Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 105 minutes

It’s a bad night in Texas: The zombies are out. Planet Terror‘s take on the zombie film is much grittier (read: more steamy, more violent, more bloody and less funny) than commercial ventures such as Shaun of the Dead, and what it sets out to do it does very well. The film is made as an homage to zombie movies and the kinds of violent films shown at “grindhouse theatres” in the 1970s. In combination with Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof, these two films constitute Grindhouse.

The film starts with a fake trailer (which would later be done for real and released under the same name) for Machete, in which one of Mexico’s Federales hacks off limbs with a machete. The trailer sets the tone for the movie we are about to see, although very quickly the main feature reveals itself to be even more blood-soaked, and while there are some moments of comedy by actors who deliver rather witty lines deadpan, the film’s dialogue overall is quite serious.

We meet a number of characters who will soon come together to defeat the zombie uprising, including gogo dancer Cherry Darling. On the night she decides to call it quits at the strip club, she runs into El Wray, a former boyfriend, at a steakhouse with the best meat in Texas. Cherry Darling is played by Rose McGowan, while Freddie Rodriguez is El Wray, who is much more talented in the art of mass murder than he lets on, especially when the victims are undead.

Bruce Willis also makes two brief appearances as a general who wants to immunise himself against the green vapour that turns everybody to zombies; he is presented in a way that evokes a kind of alienation (as far as I can remember, he never interacts with another character in the same frame).

The story, which takes place during one night, is very simple: Zombies arrive; some fight the zombies while others turn into zombies; lots of explosions and bloodletting, led mostly by the unlikely hero El Wray; survivors escape to Mexico. There is also some domestic drama with a doctor (Josh Brolin), his unfaithful wife who is also a nurse (Marley Shelton) and their young boy.

The film was made for its visual effects, and the zombies’ bubbling epidermis is consistently revolting. So too are the instances of cannibalism (although zombies don’t seem to eat other zombies, they do like the taste of human flesh) and the drops of blood on the lens of the camera. The scenes of violence are disproportionately bloody compared with the bodies being decimated, and often the bodies seem to disintegrate on impact with a slow-moving motor vehicle, releasing an amazing amount of blood that gushes in every direction.

Planet Terror contains numerous jump cuts, often timed with specific actions in the film itself, and in this way, the film diverges from the films it pretends to emulate since Rodriguez makes visible his evident manipulation of the film itself, instead of the latter being a work that is affected by random factors such as time, heat, friction, etc. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, the viewer will have to decide for himself or herself.

This world is clearly a part of the Grindhouse world that is otherwise defined by Deathproof, and a number of characters appear in both. Also, the show hosted by Jungle Julia, a character in Tarantino’s film, is mentioned here on the radio. But while Tarantino’s universe was conceivably a slightly manipulated version of a world close to our reality, Planet Terror makes a mistake when it mentions Chris Rock by name, thereby pretending both that the world is close to ours and (in being made with the conventions of a zombie film, including the presence of zombies) that it is not. Whatever the viewer’s reading of these finer points, it remains a very entertaining film, though if one took away the fire and the blood, there wouldn’t be much left standing.