Moi, zombie - Chronique de la douleur (1998)

I, Zombie may not be exactly the kind of putrid instant gratification Romero or Fulci fans are looking for, but they have much to gain by getting over that fact and watching past the first fifteen minutes. Andrew Parkinson has created a monster of a different breed, and while he nonetheless owes much to the aforementioned predecessors in the genre, he has more in common thematically with Hitchcock or Antonioni (and I'm not invoking those names lightly). Horror fans may complain that I, Zombie is too slow and that nothing really happens, and their sentiments were probably echoed by some of the first viewers of Red Desert. No surprise; essentially, this is textbook European Art Cinema filtered through the rotting flesh of the living dead. The temps morts in the story only serves to heighten the nauseating distress that we feel as we wait for Mark's body to slide off his bones and into complete nothingness. There is definitely not the kind of action-paced gorror that made Dawn of the Dead so awesome in this film, but Parkinson does a more than adequate job of creating a terrifyingly bleak universe via a psychological journey into the life of an emotionally lifeless men. I, Zombie is, ultimately, a metaphor for male sexual neurosis (from homoerotic urges to being capable of deriving pleasure only from pictures of women), and Mark is impotent in the face of a potential understanding of the origins of that neurosis. Science provides no answers and his own intellect can't measure up to the horrifying forces of the primal scene and castration anxiety. The documentary-like interview interludes are much more than the banal and uninsightful commentary that they seem to be, as our vision of Mark's decomposition acquires the horrible weight of a real life experience, a notion reinforced at the end of the film by the montage of photographs of him growing up in backyards not too different from the one you played in when you were seven. Granted, there are some lacking technical moments here: sloppy editing, poorly figured camera angles, and obfuscatory lighting, but there are also moments of formal brilliance (the beginning of the `drill scene') that show an understanding of generic conventions and evince an ability to disrupt them to even more powerful effect. In the end, the few formal faux pas are overshadowed by an incredibly engaging nightmare that you may never be able to forget. The film is funny at times, but that's not its goal; it wants to take you down with it. I, Zombie will probably make you sad, might make you throw up, and will definitely make you think. No question about it: five brilliant stars.