Haiti's history meets teen romance in Bertrand Bonello's nitwit flick, ZOMBI CHILD

I've been a fan of the films of Bertrand Bonello (shown below) for years now -- Nocturama and Saint Laurent are my favorites -- so it gives me no pleasure to report that his latest, ZOMBI CHILD, is an embarrassing, unadulterated piece of crap. Unless M. Bonello is simply having us on? If so, he's managed to con most of our critical establishment, no great achievement considering the current state of movie criticism. It is not that his film has no real scares, suspense or thrills, as do most films with the word zombie (or, as here, zombi) in the title. Nor that instead of those usual attributes, a filmmaker has skewed his work toward intelligence and politics, economics, and history. Robin Campillo managed all that just about perfectly in his zombie movie, They Came Back (Les Revenants).

Here, the history of Haiti, colonization, teenage infatuation, zombie love and other subjects bounce off each other repeatedly without ever making much of a connection -- intellectually or emotionally. It takes over an hour before that connection finally arrives. And once it does, the movie just grows stupider.

TrustMovies is sorry, but it is simply not enough to toss in everything you think you know about these subjects and then expect this to somehow coalesce. You've got to make your tale resonate in an edifying manner so that your characters seem at least a tad important, maybe even believable. Bonello utterely fails at this. Plus, he's unusually sloppy (our Haitian zombie forgets to move slowly, once he's washing himself in the river).

The movie, despite its intellectual pretensions, does not even qualify as subtle or smart, for it is simply exposition piled upon more exposition, until it arrives dead on its feet -- in a way that puts to shame its own zombies.

Toggling back and forth between Haiti in the 1960s -- as one of those zombies is created to join others in the sugar-cane work force -- and an elite girls' school in present-day France, where the entitled white students form cliques and discuss boys, music and sorority nonsense, deciding whether or not to allow a new black student to join, Zombi Child moves along at the pace of the old-fashioned undead. To and fro we go, from Haiti to France, with things occasionally broken up by a nightmare or a flesh-eating fantasy. Come on, Bonello, we know you can do better than this.

Even the film's minimal special effects are cheesy -- black eyeballs yet?! -- while the finale offers up the most embarrassing use of Rodgers & Hammerstein's You'll Never Walk Alone to ever hit the screen. It makes even the ending of the movie Priest seem unduly reticent.

I am tempted to call this film a piece of intentional camp. But, no, I know in my heart that the camp here in unintentional. More's the pity.

From Film Movement and running 103 very long minutes, Zombi Child hits DVD and digital today, Tuesday, May 19 -- for purchase and, I would guess, rental. Your move.

In Steven Soderbergh's UNSANE, nitwittery hits a ripe new height

You've got to hand it to Steven Soderbergh. When he's good (as in last year's Logan Lucky), he's very good, and when he fails, he does it big-time: no halfway-there for this guy! His new movie, UNSANE, is as ripe a piece of unintentional camp silliness that we've seen in, well, let's just say it makes that recent Halle Berry thriller Kidnap look like a classic of the genre. Word has it that Unsane was filmed entirely via cell phone (see shot of the director, below).

If so, congratulations --  though the film is nowhere as good as either King Kelly or Tangerine, both of which were "cell-phone" precursors of this overlong, let's-toss-believability-out-the-window mess.

The mess is less due to Mr. Soderbergh, who at least knows how to move things along, than to its writers -- Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer -- who take a smart, timely idea (a rehab center that entraps its clients and then won't let them go until their insurance payments have expired) and then fills it with such stupid and nitwit details (male and female patients sleep in the same room?) and ridiculous coincidence that all credibility is soon left for dead.

The film stars Claire Foy (above), who is onscreen for practically the entire movie and does a yeoman job of "trying." But her character is so thoroughly manufacturer-to-fit-the-bill that, again, any credence or caring is lost to behavior that is rather unlike any seen either on screen or in the world as we know it. (The character is repeatedly warned what her violent behavior will bring her, and so she engages in it like there's no tomorrow.)

This makes her rather the equal of the film's villain, played with enough relish to fill three movies (and a whole lot of hot dogs) by Joshua Leonard, above, who has been quite good elsewhere (Humpday), and I'm sure will rise again.

For a short while (this is the most believable section of the film), we are meant to wonder if our girl is sane or not so, but it soon becomes clear that she's the victim. Subsidiary characters are the equal, in terms of believability, of the leads: There's the unhelpful matron, played by Polly McKie (above, left) and another patient, limned by the always-fun Juno Temple (below), who exists simply and only to annoy our heroine.

The most interesting character, a patient who is really an investigative reporter planning to "out" this rehab center, is played by Jay Pharoah (below, right), but what this fellow can so easily accomplish (rather obviously yet without anyone noticing) just adds to the film's foolishness.

Yes, we also get that scene of running down totally unpopulated hallways (this is yet another "thriller" in which a medical facility seems to have lost its entire staff), and a heroine who can stab the bad guy but then forgets to do it again so he is incapacitated. And on and on it goes.

In retrospect, I think this may be the perfect movie for our Trump era -- in which everybody (on both sides of the screen) is either sleazy or stupid. Good luck to us all.

From Bleecker Street and running a too-long 97 minutes the movie opens (pretty much nationwide, I believe) this Friday, March 23. Click here then scroll down to find the theater(s) nearest you.