MadS is good. Not sure about the big S in MadS. Or even what “MadS” is meant to mean (on screen it’s MADS, by the way). Typography to one side, surely it’s one of the best one-shot movies of all time, in the pantheon alongside the likes of Russian Ark and Victoria, with director David Moreau really using the immediate you-are-right-there-ness of the one-shot movie to its full effect.
There are three lead actors, each busting their nuts with hyper-committed performances, and as Moreau daisy-chains from one character to the next – elegant segues starkly contrasting with the rest of the film – he takes a film that starts at cocaine frenzy and winds it up from there.
We meet handsome rich kid Romain – popular, sexy, minted – snorting some new drug at his dealer’s house before he climbs into daddy’s Mustang to drive home. En route he pulls over to deal with the live cigarette end he’s accidentally dropped onto the upholstery. And before he knows it some strange person is in his car alongside him. The young woman looks like something from a medieval asylum, is dressed in bandages and appears to have no tongue. Let me take you to the police station or a hospital, Romain suggests, which makes her so agitated she stabs herself to death on the front seat of the car. Which sounds spoilerish but is just the first incident in a long night of escalating weirdness.
Moreau piles on the incident. Romain and his spoilt rich-kid friends, at a party where he gives his girlfriend Anaïs and his secret fuck-buddy Julia some of the same drug he snorted earlier. Romain cycling frantically back to the parental home where someone has tripped the burglar alarm. Romain dealing with the intruder, before a black-clad SWAT team arrive and the energy shifts up yet another level.
Romain’s eyes are by now glowing in the dark and he’s making funny clicking sounds and jerking his head spasmodically. As Romain’s condition worsens Moreau manages to maintain the balancing act – is Romain’s bad night out a drug-induced hallucination, or is it somehow really happening? Whatever the answer is, and the ambiguity is intensified by some very smart sound design work by Germain Boulay, Romain is soon out of the picture and it’s Anaïs’s turn to gurn, click, glow and behave in a way that veers between victim and monster. Followed, as the film hits its crescendo, by Julia.
Milton Riche plays Romain, and if you think his intensely physical performance is remarkable, wait till you see Laurie Pavy as Anaïs, who somehow manages to top it. As Julia, Lucille Guillaume is in the unenviable position of arriving in the spotlight at precisely the moment when Moreau’s film starts to feel like it might have run out of new places to go, but hers is also a vastly committed performance.
Surely, in this day and age, the one-shot movie is far easier to pull off than it used to be. Do one-shot movies even have to be done in one shot any more? Can’t the joins be sanded away in post production? I leave these questions hanging there and in a way the answers don’t matter. Moreau makes it feel real, his choreography and sense of accelerating pace is remarkable and in Philip Lozano he has a director of photography who must have sweated blood on the lighting set-ups and camera movements, which always feel organic and in the moment.
Throughout this horror movie without obvious monsters the critique of good-looking entitled French brats remains always there to one side. No matter how badly it goes for Romain, Anaïs and Julia, at some level they deserve it. Which makes this gnarly, dark and gripping night from hell all the more satisfying and even slightly funny, in all the wrong ways.
MadS – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
