Fantasia 09 Review: MUTANTS

[Our thanks to Matthew Grinshpun for the following review.]

It's been claimed more than once that vampires are the new zombies, and a quick glance at the Fantasia Film Festival's programming would seem to settle the matter. That said, no genre festival would be complete with at least one picture to bear the flesh-eating banner, and this year the role falls to David Morley's Mutants. Unfortunately, Morley's uninspired entry fails to carry the standard. Shot in a barren Picardy, buried in snow and washed in gray, Mutants left me feeling cold.

Sonia (Hélène de Fouguerolles) and Marco (Francis Renaud) are two lovestruck survivors of a viral zombie epidemic, rolling across the desolate landscape of Northern France in an ambulance commandeered by a cagey woman soldier with an itchy trigger finger. We won't get to know her, or her motives, as Morley dispatches her quickly in in favor of focusing on the relationship between Sonia and Marco, who find themselves in the grips of a moral dilemma; Marco has been bit and begins his slow, inevitable slide into zombiehood. Meanwhile, we learn that Sonia may very well hold the key to a vaccine against the plague.

Earth's last hope of a savior and her zombie lover: Appealing concept, but the execution falls flat. By the time Marco has hopelessly descended into mutant bloodlust, his nose bifurcating into a four chambered snot-expulsion apparatus, his relationship with Sonia remains as profound as a paddling pool. Morley refuses to give us a reason to care about this couple before he leaves Sonia to fend for herself in an abandoned hospital.

The situation gives rise to some desperate attempts to build tension. With a serious case of the cinematographic jitters, Morley is the latest director to fall victim to the idea that a shaky camera can make up for a shaky plot. But no amount of cataleptic camera work can mask Morley's inability to craft an atmosphere of fear, and it's amazing just how many opportunities he wastes. One scene, where Sonia is crawling through a ventilation shaft, begs for a tightly edited chase sequence. Yet, in a stunning display of ineptitude, by the time Morley has sent his zombie in after her, she's already slithered her way out.

It's sad to watch Morley squander every possibility to compensate for his film's clearly restricted budget. By deciding on "mutants" rather than conventional zombies, he cleared the way to endow his creatures with much more imaginative attributes than botched rhinoplasties. Likewise, the wintry setting could have contributed more than the occasional landscape shot of an icy vista. But Mutants is a film defined less by its poverty of means than by its poverty of ideas.

Review by Matthew Grinshpun.