MadS movie review

Everything begins in art. Burning, waving red areas, with the first names of those involved in the opening credits above them, form a blood-red image. A mouth opened wide and twisted into a scream. The camera moves further and further back, the image turns out to be a painting, and it is hanging in the apartment of a drug dealer, where Romain (Milton Riche) is currently drawing a line. A reddish-brown powder, apparently a new super drug. Appropriately euphoric, the young man jumps into his car and speeds away, between the letters of the film title that tower tree-high over the landscape, while the soundtrack pumps and plays “Computerstaat” by Abwärts, a German punk classic. However, only a few verses long, because director David Moreau doesn't leave much time before setting the tempo of “MadS“ attracts. On the way, Romain picks up an injured, distraught woman who cannot make herself understood.

At least she can make Romain understand that her tongue has been cut out – and that it is infected with something. Romain's first reflex is to call 911. However, as high as he is, this would probably get him into massive trouble himself, so he quickly takes the stranger with him, whereupon she dies a short time later spitting blood in his passenger seat. At least from the looks of it, because after Romain showered the foreign blood from his body, the corpse disappeared. However, there is no time to search, because Romain lets a few pushy friends drag him to a party instead. “No power to drugs,” you think to yourself for a moment before the escalation spiral really picks up. Because while the stranger, who is apparently still alive, sets off the alarm system at home, something dark and wild-like seems to be increasingly taking control in Romain…

When drug rush meets bloodlust...

When drug rush meets bloodlust…

In terms of content, what follows doesn't really offer anything new: “MadS” is basically a classic epidemic horror film, like the one you might find in the early work of David Cronenberg (“Rabid – The Roaring Death”) or George A. Romero (“Crazies “) knows. A kind of anger virus tears the veneer of civilization off people in this subgenre. A classic topos of modern horror cinema, which the French director David Moreau – best known for his minimalist, effective home invasion horror film “Them” (2006) – embellishes with all sorts of formal and narrative tricks. The most obvious staging device is the fact that “MadS” is realized as a one-take real-time film and has no (visible) cuts.

Everything in one go

Now this is certainly not a new cinematic strategy. First used by suspense cinema great Alfred Hitchcock in his crime classic “Cocktail for a Corpse”, it gained new popularity in the age of digital cinema. It was used for New French Extremism (Gaspar Noé's “Climax”) as well as for Berlin hipster genre cult (Sebastian Schipper's “Victoria”). It was again Noé who, years before, had radically thought it through in “Irreversible” and literally caused it to implode by combining the illusionary machine of the one-take movie with an achronological alienation effect.

All subsequent films – by Noé himself, but also by other, less intellectual filmmakers – inevitably had to fall short of this radicalization, but that's of course not a bad thing at all. Because as a authentication strategy, especially for horror cinema, which, like hardly any other genre, depends on a certain suspension of disbelief – that is, on the fact that the audience accepts the game with their own primal fears at face value for an hour and a half in the cinema – it has often proven to be highly effective proven. At least when it is used skillfully, and David Moreau certainly knows how to do that.

The infected literally discover the animal within them - and that rarely ends well!

The infected literally discover the animal within them – and that rarely ends well!

Because even though in “MadS” he mainly serves us new things that are already familiar, this potpourri works pretty well for a long time. As a virus thriller bordering on a zombie film (which no one really knows where exactly it is), as a hysterically hyped-up drug trip film – and finally a bit as a conceptual horror film, because “MadS” becomes really interesting when it reaches its halfway point reveals the second, narrative trick. Because just as the virus continues to spread from host to host, the film ultimately jumps from protagonist to protagonist, dissolving the initially seemingly somewhat subjective narrative perspective into a multi-perspectivity, while previous protagonists are callously eliminated from the off-screen.

The ultra-bloody, hyper-sexualized splatter film “The Sadness” from Taiwan certainly set a benchmark for recent epidemic horror cinema, and it should therefore be mentioned at this point that “MadS” definitely does not try to build on its excesses. In fact, what you explicitly see here isn't even all that bloody. On the one hand, this may be due to the presumably very low budget, but on the other hand, director Moreau is obviously interested in other aspects of the material, and “bloodless” is by no means automatically synonymous with “harmless”. Because “MadS” is intense, consistent and largely breathless, and even within the familiar narrative framework it finds an original take here and there that has never been seen before.

Conclusion: David Moreau's “MadS” is essentially a classic epidemic horror film, told using the narrative gimmick of real-time narration (apparently) recorded in a single take. So you shouldn't expect anything completely new or original here – but that shouldn't stop you from watching this breathless and well-directed film. Because as an almost hour and a half, drug-induced cinematic horror trip, “MadS” is definitely convincing.