Pontypool (2008) – Review

Sometimes a movie comes along that defies conventional explanation. Whether it’s the ideas that lay in the central concept, or the way the film is presented, normal words prove to be insufficient to do justice to the motion picture you’ve just experienced and you find yourself struggling to find the correct phases to make yourself understood. Of course, in the case of Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool, it proves to be a completely apt problem because the whole movie is based around the corruption of language and how it ultimately leads to the corruption of the mind.
Confused yet? Oh don’t worry, we’re just getting started, as we enter a movie that somehow fits neatly into the zombie/infection genre bracket, and yet features precious little of the iconography that comes with it. Taking its cue from Orson Welles’ infamous 19 38 War Of The Worlds radio broadcast that threw its listeners into legitimate panic, Pontypool delivers an experience so strange, to some it may border on incomprehensible; but as we’re about to find out, that may prove to save your life.

Fallen shock jock radio personality Mazzy Grant is heading into the first day of his new job as a violent snowstorm buffets the small, Canadian town of Pontypool, Ontario. After witnessing a stange woman emerging from the blizzard to mumble gibberish at him before disappearing back into the falling snow, Mazzy already has plans to use it as a topic during his morning broadcast, but as he settles into his booth and prepares himself, it’s already clear that he and his more conservative producer, Sydney Briar, are going to clash.
However, as technical assistant Laurel-Ann watches on, a major story seems to break concerning a riot that’s broken out in town outside the office of a Dr. Jon Mendez that’s further corroborated by the radio station’s “eye in the sky”, Ken Loney. However, reports are coming out so garbled, that not only does Grant have no clear idea what is going on as he reports it, but emerging details only manage to grow more confusing. Are the people of Pontypool really going insane and trying to kill and/or eat each other? And if they are, what the hell is causing it?
Some form of explanation arrives in the form of a mysterious French audio transmission that Laurel-Ann speedily translates – although she may wish she hadn’t. It instructs that people remain indoors, refrain from using terms of endearment and baby talk in their speech and to above all avoid speaking English, but while these orders are disturbing and confusing in equal measure, the final instruction insists that you don’t translate the message. From here, things both start to unravel and simultaneously make sense when Dr. Jon Mendez himself arrives through an open window to deliver some theories which are seemingly backed up when one of their number starts acting erratically and quick regresses to a confused, babbling, feral state. It seems that a killer virus has descended upon Pontypool and it infects you through – language?

Criminally underseen upon its release (by me too, I’m ashamed to say), Pontypool is possibly one of the wildest concepts I’ve seen in a long time that should prove remarkably difficult to translate on screen simply because of the contradictory nature of what the film is about. After all, how to you visually spell out to an audience a complex concept that suggests that a deadly virus is rewriting the brains of those who catch it into murderous bezerkers, but you can only catch it with the usage of certain infected words that have somehow entered the English language. Frankly, it’s borderline impossible, but Bruce McDonald deserves all the accolades in the world for a) even attempting it and b) managing to make the idea as coherent as he does – now, make no mistake, this is a film that will remain defiantly impenetrable to anyone expecting your typical infection movie (think a stripped back The Crazies but with the vocabulary police), but if you’re up for 90 minutes of brain popping concepts and a garbled discussion afterwards about the nature of speech and how certain things do actually infect out way of speaking (trigger words, slang, infurating brain farts at the worst time), then the scenarios that Pontypool puts across may be worryingly prevalent.

Essentially taking the form of a glorified play production (single location, minimal cast, basic production values), it’s entirely fitting that McDonald has made a movie about infected language an extremely talky affair. We are actually shown next to nothing concerning the riots and some of the more overtly horror moments are delivered verbally over the phone as witnesses struggle to find the words to explain the horrors that they’re seeing, but the tell, don’t show approach works well in sustaining a sense of tension. Of course, we see some of the infection  when a member of the tiny cast speaks one of the forbidden words and subsequently goes into fuege state as they struggle to get past the word that’s fatally stumped them, but from there the illness takes a slightly more conventional route as we get the usual serving of a thousand yard stare, blood vomiting and the animalistic nature to bash their own face against the glass of a sound proof booth.
Considering that they have quite an unorthodox idea to play off, the cast perform impressively, with Stephen McHattie’s measured tones leading the way. Yes, a lot of the dialogue is either random conjecture or confused exposition, but it’s exactly the panicked reactions and the uneasy attempts to rationalise that make Pontypool so facinating and the fact that so much of it is left up in the air helps with the confounding nature of it. We never find out how the virus started or if the scattered missing posters for a cat named “Honey” contributed heavily to the spread of the verbal infection (no terms of endearment, remember), or even if the attempts to outwit the virus is even working – how do you explain anything when the key to surviving is not to be understood?

Obviously those that prefer their horror/thrillers far more simple and generic will probably find Pontypool a rambling slog, but while it’s amusing that people might not “get” a movie that requires you to be in a state of incomprehension to survive, it’s still frustrating that a film that’s trying so hard to nail something so complex in such a stripped back way may get dismissed because somebody isn’t up for the experience.
Yes, it struggles to hold cohesion at the end and I’m not quite sure if it ever truly adequately explains some of its core ideas during the chaos, but for freaky, far-out, ways to give the realms of Cronenbergian infection horror a bold new area to play in, Pontypool should render you speechless with admiration.
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