Ravenous (Les affamés) (2017)
Thoughtful. Terrifying. Terrific.
also…
How to make a really scary movie about chairs.
Ravenous (Les affamés in its original French) is one of the freshest and most disturbing zombie flicks we’ve seen in recent years. Be warned: there will be a few more Spoilers than usual going forward.
At first bite, Ravenous tastes a lot like other “international” zombie flicks, including # Alive, The Night Eats the World, and 24 Days Later: take the undead, sprinkle them in an exotic location, shake, and sip.
This time the setting is a remote Quebec village where a handful of survivors fend off and adjust to life with fast moving zombies.
The stock characters are all there: Bonin (Marc-André Grondin - Goon) - a sensitive “hero” with a taste for bad jokes, Tania (Monia Chokri) - the tough but compassionate female lead who may or may not have been infected, Zoé (Charlotte St-Martin) - the obligatory kid that everyone wants to save, and others, from the damaged but brave Céline (Brigitte Poupart) to the maternal Pauline ( Micheline Lanctôt). And all the normal tropes are there too: people get used to life with ghouls, zombies threaten their new order, a big fight takes place, and people are eaten.
So what makes this flick worth checking out?
Here be some Spoilers:
First (not-spoilery) the cast is solid and although they don’t get much to play with beyond generic cutouts, they do a respectable job of bringing the characters to life. The setting is also both visually attractive and creepy. There are a few shots in the village, but most take place on country roads, in forests around the town, and in fog filled fields. The feeling, even in sunlit scenes, is unsettling. You know there are zombies out there…but are they behind the next tree, eating the neighbor’s cat…or watching you?
The real hook in Ravenous is that the ghouls are not entirely (un)dead.
Bites affect people and eventually turn them into brain munchers, but the process is a bit different and less predictable than in typical films. What is also not at all typical is the behavior of the zombies. If not quite intelligent, they are not mindless shamblers. They watch people, show restraint when it is to their advantage, can be stealthy, and are capable of laying sophisticated traps for their victims. They also engage in some bizarre rituals, including building Tower of Babel-like structures out of chairs and children’s toys. It is hard to say just what they are up to…but it feels like they have some sort of culture and maybe even religion.
Ok…so what IS going on?
This is more speculation than Spoiler, but there seem to be some clues in the beginning, end, and title of the movie.
Ravenous kicks off differently than any zombie film I’ve seen. The opening sequence is a race track, with cars running in seemingly endless circles. One of the drivers has pulled to the side and is making out with a girl when a zombie attacks. The movie then jumps to the village and the characters and the main story.
A little shooting, lots of running, and much nail biting takes place takes place for the next ninety minutes, then - after the apparent end of the film - the race car driver (and his car) suddenly appear.
So what’s going on?
There seems to be plenty of backstory that isn’t shared, but the driver and opening scene and the zombies building mountains of chairs seem connected to the title: Ravenous.
How? On the one hand, Ravenous is a straightforward tie to the idea that people are eating one another, but to be ravenous means to be never satisfied. You eat, and eat, and eat (or whatever) and are never full.
That’s what happens in the opener: cars just keep driving around endlessly. Later the undead obsessively collect items and place them in a mound. Why? We don’t know. But it is ceaseless. Whatever they seeking, they never seem to find it.
And the driver showing up at the end? He didn’t bring a conclusion to the story, just a circling back to the start - with no explanation of what happened between…no meaning…nothing to fill the huger of the viewer.
There is more: a couple going back and forth over pickle recipes that are never quite perfect, a soldier who does not realize there is a zombie apocalypse and keeps mentally reliving the day he returned from war, and a bunch more.
So what is this movie really about? Hell if we know. But we do know that its semi-smart zombies are creepy as heck, that the characters are interesting and sympathetic, and something really weird is going on behind the scenes.
Check it out and let us know if you figure it out.
You can catch Ravenous HERE.
Three out of Five Chairs (what else)?
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Enjoyed Ravenous? You may want to take a bite out of one of these!
