Pontypool: Shut up or die
Imagine for a moment that you’re an ordinary person. Not only that: you’re the sort of ordinary person who’s perfectly content to live out his life in a small rural town.
Imagine that a bizarre plague strikes your town, so contagious and so deadly that everyone is placed under quarantine, and policed by the military. Imagine that in the midst of this crisis, you have little to no contact with the outside world–not even the world outside your own house. What little you know, you’ve learned from extremely sketchy reports that even local radio refuses to confirm.
Imagine that as the day wears on, it becomes more and more apparent to you that you’re probably going to die today, in the most horrific way you can imagine.
That’s a good time to get in touch with your loved ones, hey? That’s when you want to draw your people close, in comfort, in reassurance. Maybe you want to say all the things you never got around to saying. Maybe you just want to say a proper goodbye.
Now imagine you’ve just learned that talking to your loved ones–or even sharing a room with them–is the surest means of transmitting this disease.
Sucks to be you, chum!
And the worst part is, in the world of Pontypool, mostly you’re just part of the problem.
Stephen McHattie plays Grant Mazzy, a jaded radio talk show host whose outspoken demeanour made him famous back when being a loudmouthed jerk was the fashion, but in these kinder, gentler times, has only served to drag him down lower than he ever thought he’d go. He’s managed–as well as a man like him can be–by Sydney (played by Lisa Houle,) a weary, hopeful woman who has perhaps deceived herself about how well she can rein Grant in. She agrees with much of what he says, but she can’t allow him to go ahead and say it.
The beauty of Pontypool is that nearly all the action takes place over the radio. You never leave the church basement that serves as the town’s radio station, and apart from one brief scene of horror, you never see anybody die, or anybody kill.
You just hear them, right there in your head, right along with Grant and the station manager and their engineer. (And I highly recommend watching this film on your computer, while wearing headphones. It will eff you up for life.)
You just listen to terrified people trying to hold it together long enough to be of some kind of assistance even as they’re watching people they’ve grown up with get torn apart, or do the tearing. You know as little as the characters do; you have as little certainty of how it’s all going to end.
Or maybe the beauty of Pontypool is the virus itself, transmitted through the spoken word, though it’s impossible to say which word will infect you, apart from common terms of endearment, and it only works if you understand what’s been said. The afflicted turn savage because the virus demands to be spread, to be communicated, and in a place like Pontypool, there are only so many people to go around.
Maybe it’s the film’s many mysteries: the doctor who turns up in the second act seems far more switched-on than you’d expect of a GP in a small farming town; the bright-eyed engineer (who looks like she’s about fourteen years old) has done a tour of duty in Afghanistan; Grant is shot-gunning scotch at six in the morning and nobody so much as blinks at that.
None of these things are ever explained.
Maybe it’s the little things, the unexpected touches that elevate Pontypool from just another claustrophobic thriller to something greater, more meaningful: the moments of humour, dark as pitch; a montage in one of the film’s bleakest moments that articulates the terrible tragedy that’s taking place outside; the casting of real actors in all the major roles–people who inhabit their characters, instead of two-dimensional sexyfaces who barely understand where they are.
Pontypool will scare the hell out of you. It’ll gross you out. It’ll make you laugh. It’ll break your heart.
You gotta see it, dude.
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I do think that “shut up or die” is probably the best tagline I have ever seen on a movie poster.
Interesting… there’s a radio play version that’s been cut together from the movie’s audio.
We listened to it a while back and it was very involving. The writeup in the link says the film is even better; I’ll have to check it out.
I didn’t know there was a radio play version. I bet the film isn’t better so much as it is different, you know, in the same way the movie version of a book is different. Sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) the movie version isn’t as good, but it’s not always a fair comparison to make.
Pontypool itself is based on a novel called Pontypool Changes Everything, which the author (Tony Burgess) adapted for the screen.
Yikes, yes, this was an extremely creepy movie. The lovely folks who made it know that sound is the most important part of a horror flick, and they exploited it in every possible way.
Freak-tastic movie!
Sounds delightfully creepy.