It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
MadS is a 2024 French zombie film written and directed by David Moreau. I knew very little about the film going in, only that it involved young people doing drugs, things getting out of control, and there were supposedly zombies involved. Other than that I didn’t know what to expect and damn if I wasn’t blown away by this film. I’m going to try to avoid too many spoilers, because I think this film benefits from going in as blind as possible.
As stated above, this is all about young partiers, shot in the French town of Mulhouse over ten days. One of the most impressive elements of the film is that it is filmed entirely in one shot. Cinematographer Philip Loranzo was the only cameraman, and underwent four weeks of cardio and strength training in order to make sure he could use the custom Steadicam rig, weighing 26 pounds.
Moreau has stated in interviews that the story was inspired by a nightmare in which he was drugged and having a bad trip, which led to him thinking about a disease that could be spread by the drug. Then, while out walking, he was startled by an actor in zombie make-up who was filming an episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. He says it was like “the God of Zombies sending [him] a strange sign” to make the film. Moreau took inspiration from the 2015 German crime thriller Victoria which was also filmed entirely in one shot.
The cast and crew spent four days rehearsing the long take, with a fifth technical rehearsal before spending the next five nights shooting, one take per night. Because of this approach, they could only do the single take per night in order to maintain the narrative’s one night storyline. After two days of disasters keeping them from completing the first two tries, they pulled together and did three night shoots, with the fifth and final shoot being the take used for the film.
If that doesn’t make you want to watch MadS, you might be on the wrong website.
MadS takes place on the birthday of our first protagonist, Romain (Milton Riche), and we open with him hanging out with his drug dealer, snorting a line of an unknown red powder. He leaves, staggering to his father’s vintage Mustang, and drives home. Before he can arrive, however, he drops his cigarette in his lap and pulls over, only to find a heavily bandaged woman who tries to steal the car, or at least force Romain to drive her away. She plays a recording for him, which explains that she has been infected with an unknown disease and has had her teeth and tongue surgically removed.
She then begins repeatedly stabbing herself in the neck with something she found in the glove box and seemingly dies. Romain speeds home and freaks out.
As one would.
There’s an intensity to every scene that is only enhanced by the single take structure and the way the script weaves characters in and out of scenes, allowing for the camera to follow the story wherever it leads. Once the other two main protagonists, Romain’s girlfriend Anaïs (Laurie Pavy), and his secret lover Julia (Lucille Guillaume) get their hands on the red powder, we are given two more narrative threads that allow the film to expand until eventually we are in a full-scale zombie apocalypse that gradually and naturally develops in the background.
Riche’s and Pavy’s performances are spectacular, as they begin twitching and succumbing to extremely violent urges. Guillaume is given a more traditional “final girl” style story, as she seems to be immune to the effects of the powder, at least to the zombification effects. She still has a really bad trip. Pavy’s Anaïs, in particular, shines as she gets more and more disturbing and appears to be immune to gunshots. The long sequence following her as she tries to get home is a bravura performance, especially as she and Julia rendezvous briefly and psychotically.
MadS goes to show that despite all the haters out there who say the zombie genre is dead and boring, there will always be innovative approaches to storytelling into which flesh-eating zombies can be incorporated. This was one of the most engaging and innovative zombie films I’ve seen in ages. It goes beyond just solid filmmaking, good performances, and fantastic gore effects. In a world where getting any film made is nearly impossible, that all these things are incorporated into the single, continuous take that lasts just under ninety minutes is miraculous.