Movie Review: Pontypool

Pontypool *** ½
Directed by: Bruce McDonald
Written By: Tony Burgess based on his book.
Starring: Stephen McHattie (Grant Mazzy), Lisa Houle (Sydney Briar), Georgina Reilly (Laurel Ann), Hrant Alianak (Dr. Mendez), Rick Roberts (Ken Loney).

For a film where a disease causes mass groups of people to brutally kill each other on the streets of small town Ontario, Pontypool is a strangely plausible film. Perhaps that’s because it never ventures outside of it’s one and only location – the basement of church that houses the studio for the town’s radio station. The reports that come in from around town are shocking, and hard to believe. And since the characters in the film never get to see precisely what is happening outside their walls, neither do we. It all seems so unreal.

Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) was, we gather, once a big time radio host. Now, he’s little more than a drunk, still going on the air to piss people off, but now he’s stuck in the small Ontario town of Pontypool, where no one seems to much care what he has to say. He doesn’t care that no one cares – he keeps right on saying whatever he wants anyway. He spends his mornings with his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and their tech guru Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly), recently back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, reporting on school closures and local plays, and occasionally checking in with Ken in the “Sunshine Chopper” for traffic updates. It is all so perfectly boring.

But then bizarre reports start coming in. A riot seems to have broken out at the offices of Dr. Mendez, but no one seems clear as to why. The get some eyewitness accounts, but nothing official from the police or anyone else. Ken Loney reports that he is trapped in a silo, and people keep marching past chanting something. And the dead are everywhere. The BBC calls the radio station to find out what is going on. Does this have something to do with Canada’s history of separatist terrorist threats? Why are French Canadian riot police blockading the town? And why are they delivering cryptic messages, all in French, about the danger of speaking to their loved ones, with a warning not to translate the warning into English?

Pontypool is fascinating because of what we don’t see, not because of what we do see. We hear the reports of the rampaging violence, but we never actually see it. We hear muffled screams and chanting at times, but we never see people ripping each other apart. The film is almost a chamber piece, with only a few characters interacting with each other on a small set. That makes the performances all the more important, and the three main actors couldn’t be better. Stephen McHattie is something of a Canadian institution at this point. Maybe not as well known as Gordon Pinsett, but just about as good, McHattie has appeared in everything from Emily of New Moon to Watchmen, from Seinfeld to A History of Violence. Here, as a loudmouth DJ, we think we know what kind of performance he’s going to give, but McHattie constantly surprises us. Yes, he is a larger than life presence, but as the film progresses, he becomes more and more interesting. Houle and Reilly are more than up for the task of matching him every step of the way.

Director Bruce McDonald always makes interesting films. Sometimes, he may go a little too far in stylistic excess (as in his last film, the still good The Tracey Fragments), but I’m not sure if he’s truly capable of making a boring film. Yes, he works of Degrassi: The Next Generation, and pretty much every other Canadian show in history (although, sadly, not Corner Gas – I would have loved to see what McDonald would do with the residents of Dog River), but he does that so he can get his movies made. He is one of the most interesting directors working in Canada right now. Who else would make what essentially amounts to a zombie film, where the cause is the English language and understanding itself? What a fascinating concept for a movie. The amazing part is that McDonald actually pulls it off. Pontypool is a wonderful little film.