The New French Extremity movement, may have, sadly, petered out, but that doesn’t mean the French are done making horror films. With MadS, writer/ director David Moreau, one of the minds behind Them [Ils], has made his return to horror in style- using the single-shot style film technique to reinvigorate the zombie-infected apocalypse tale.

And sure, this has been done before…sort of…with One Cut of the Dead, but here the conceit of that one long continual take- of at least the illusuion of it- being followed right up to the bitter end.

MadS is the story of Romain, a teen leaving his dealer’s house after trying out a new pill. On his way home, he stops on the side of the road to put out the butt of a cigarette that accidently fell inside of daddy’s convertible. But when stopped, a strange inarticulate woman in distress pops up suddenly and gets inside the car. 

Romain starts out calling the police, but when they want his location he hangs up knowing that the last thing he needs is for them to charge him for driving while high. So instead, he heads towards the hospital while the woman grunts and growls in the passenger seat.

While Romain is driving, the woman tries to communicate that bad things have been done to her, putting a lot of emphasis on the inside of her mouth- was her tongue cut out?- and pulls out a weird device that has on it a recording suggesting that she’s part of some kind of government conspiracy. 

Then, she suddenly, violently, takes her life while still next to Romain in the car, causing him to drive home in a panic to plan his next move. 

Surely the woman must be real, but this all gets kind of confusing for Romain, and the viewer, after the teen hides the car with the woman’s body in his garage, goes inside the house to wash up, and returns to find that the body has vanished. Bad trip? Hmm…maybe.

Doesn’t matter. It just happens to be Romain’s birthday and his friends are all determined to drag him to a party…so he goes…cause…really, really stoned. 

Anybody who watches MadS is going to keep being reminded of two movies, but for very different reasons. The first is Goerge Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies because it certainly if what we see is real, then it sure seems like the woman might be the start of some kind of infected-people-going-nuts situation that the government wants contained. 

The second film is Gasper Noé’s Climax from 2018. Noé proved to be a master of the hand-held, one-shot style technique in films like Irreversible, Into the Void and Climax, but the way Romain, and later others, gradually are dehumanized while tripping out is also very reminiscent of those dancers in Climax who drank the LSD laced punch.

And to be clear, Climax is the better movie, but Moreau shouldn’t take that statement personally. Noé set a pretty high bar that will be hard for others to clear. But Moreau film is definately closer to an actual horror film. 

And, at the risk of being a little too honest, I feel this needs to be said. Gasper Noé’s films are great- but that real-time, single-shot, hand-held technique makes them extra great to watch while high. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed watching two movies more while stoned than Irreversible and Climax– Into the Void, not so much, but that’s cause it seemed to be trying too hard to be trippy. I didn’t watch MadS high- though I wish I did- but that’s only because I’d never heard anything about it before I flipped it on. (I just saw it was new to Shudder and recognized Moreau’s name as director.) But it doesn’t take long to recognize that Moreau has pretty much cracked the code as to why Noé’s films work so well- no matter what your mental state- including the neat title sequence, rotating protagonists and great music.

(The soundtrack sounds a lot like instrumental outtakes from Dark Side of the Moon.)

But MadS, like Climax, focuses on the drugged people and what is happening to them mostly in a realistic, voyeuristic fashion. Sure, there are a few little psychedelic flourishes, like the six-eyed mask or how Romain’s eyes glow as he walks through a strobe lit room, but when push comes to shove, Moreau relies on the hyper-realism of the hand-held technique and the wow factor of the single long take to deliver the real trip. This isn’t an easy film to pull off.  

I see some critics still calling the one-shot technique a gimmick, but I liken it more to how most now use view found-footage style. It’s been around long enough, and there are now enough movies that use this technique, that it feels more of a directorial decision on how they want a story to be told. Sure, like found footage, you have challenges. How to handle the real-time traveling between two settings becomes the new “why are they filming this in the first place?”.  And the different ways MadS handles this problem are actually some of the most memorable parts of the movie.

If MadS has a flaw, it’s that the zombie-infected story worked best in conjuction with the possibility that is all just a bad trip. Eventually, the film chooses to pull more clearly in one direction, but I’m not sure it was the direction I wanted. But I bet I’m in the minority on this point. Still, I’d like to see that other movie some day.

MadS brings something new to the zombie-infected genre– which, of course, is the challenge that directors who make films in this genre keep responding to repeatedly. Although the single-take, real-time technique Moreau uses isn’t new, it is one that is still somewhat underutilized and definitely brings something different to the table. MadS is an important bridge film that takes what is mostly considered a filming style saved for arthouse movies and applies it to a more conventional and accessible horror subgenre. It may not be another zombie-infected film, but I’m absolutely sure we are going to start to see even more one-shot horror films in the future. Thanks in part to Moreau, this now will be a more common thing.