Pontypool Movie Review
Pontypool Movie Review
Like The Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense.
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Forget about the blasphemy of the St. Valentine's Massacre — February 14 is also the date that contrary beings choose to divide and conquer we humans, using our own terms of endearment as deadly defeaters.
The obvious homage to Orson Welles' famous 1938 War of the Worlds radio prank keeps its focus on Canadian DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), producer Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly), and manager Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), all holed up inside a remote station on a snowy Valentine's Day morning. As the day goes on, the holiday made for love turns out to be anything but chocolates, hearts and flowers… OK, maybe a few hearts get broken (as do brains).
It isn't an action thriller, but the basic tenants of Pontypool — conversation, listening — could easily have been taken and made into a dull exercise in talking-heads tedium. This movie crackles with nail-biting tension throughout. Good movies about DJs are few and far between, but there is something compelling about these golden-throated characters that's ever-compelling (Play Misty For Me, The Fog, and The Booth leap to my mind). However, in most films the jock is being used as a pawn by a mortal adversary; not an unseen evil. The way in which the evil is unveiled in Pontypool and how the account ekes out like twisted poetry, is commendable to say the least.
As the shocking story unfolds in real time throughout Mazzy's broadcast, alarming reports keep coming from the station's "eye in the sky", traffic reporter Ken Loney (Rick Roberts). He tells of a riot of locals clustered at a doctor's office downtown, while simultaneously, reports of a strange rash or murder-suicides throughout the Ontario township flood the wires. The deaths are gruesome, violent, and totally baffling. Why is everyone around the station going insane? And what will happen to the trio of reporters, once their location is discovered?
McHattie's voice and mannerisms are cool and calculated (truly reminiscent of Lance Henricksen at his peak), and seductive yet aloof. Director Bruce McDonald makes the very most of his meager visual playground, as does talented DP Miroslaw Baszak, whose camera is like an undulating serpent side-winding throughout writer Tony Burgess' tumble of beautiful words. It's only talents like these that can make the proverbial lemonade from the lemons of very limited resources like these. In fact, I was so impressed that I've sought out McDonald's previous film, The Tracey Fragments (starring spooky indie darling Ellen Page).
It's movies like Pontypool that give the term "psychogical thriller" a good connotation. It's also got elements of bone-chilling horror and sly, wry comedy. All in all, destined to be one of the best indies of the year — and, as a plus, it's not a remake or a sequel. It's a pleasure to not only see something scary and original, but something standalone.
Pontypool will have a limited U.S. release, in select theaters May 29, 2009. It also on IFC On Demand.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson