Director/Screenplay – David Moreau, Producers – Yohan Baiada & Marlene Wale, Photography – Philip Lozano, Music – Nathaniel Mechaly, Visual Effects – Digital District (Supervisor – Elisa Pretta), Production Design – Rabier Ourac. Production Company – Les Enfants Terrible/Digital District/Goodfellas/OCS/Pulsar Content.
Milton Riche (Romain), Laurie Pavy (Anais), Lucille Guillaume (Julia), Yovel Lewkowski (Noa), Sasha Rudaova (The Woman on the Road)
Romain picks up some drugs to take to a party and drives home. As he experiences car troubles and pulls over, a woman gets into his car, acting crazily while bleeding and then seems to die. Unwilling to go the police with drugs in his car, Romain heads home. His girlfriend Anais comes and drags him off to the party. There she finds that Romain has managed to get her friend Julia pregnant. Romain is then called back home by the alarm at his house going off as the body of the woman proves to be alive after all. Security forces in contamination gear now surround the town. Romain, Anaias and Julia find themselves in the midst of this as the infection spreads and turns people feral.
French director David Moreau first appeared with Them (2006), co-directed with Xavier Palud, about a couple being terrorised by mysterious figures. This gained reasonable word of mouth. Palud and Moreau were then brought to the US to direct the English-language remake of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (2008), but this was a critical dud that killed their prospects. The two subsequently returned to France and went their own ways. Moreau went on to make the romance It Boy (2013), Alone (2017) where children wake up in a deserted city and the non-genre family film King (2022).
Around the internet, the title of the film is variously spelt as MadS and M.A.D.S. but on the opening credits all there is is the single word Mads with nothing dome with mixed capitalisation or to show it is an acronym. Mads is not a word that exists in the French language so one had no clue what the title actually means, unless it is perhaps some reference to the apparent outbreak of mass insanity that we get.
David Moreau makes Mads as a Long Take film. The Long Take is the idea where the entire film (or at least a portion of the film) takes place all in one shot or take with no cuts or edits. It is a logistical challenge for a filmmaker that goes all the way back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Only a handful of other films have been brave enough to make an entire film this way – see the likes of Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), PVC-1 (2007), Cut (2010), The Silent House (2010), Silent House (2011), Fish & Cat (2013), Unfriended/Cybernatural (2014), Victoria (2015), King Dave (2016), Red Mile (2016), Rendez-Vous (2019), Corona (2020) and Crazy Samurai Musashi (2020), before the genre was hilariously parodied in One Cut of the Dead (2017).
Certainly, David Moreau gets your attention within the opening scenes as the woman (Sasha Rudaova) gets in Milton Riche’s car and starts acting crazy, falling all over him, mouthing words incoherently and then bleeding as she collapses. Thereafter however, Mads suffers from the problem that all Long Take films do. In a regular film usually when someone gets in a car to drive somewhere or walks across town, we see them set out and then cut to them arriving – there is no need to show the intervening journey (unless there is a scene set in the car or something happens on the way) because that it is filler stuff that is wasting screen time. However, in that a Long Take film operates in real time and David Moreau has Mads happening in multiple different parts of the city, we are required to sit through these filler scenes as Milton Riche and Laurie Pavy travel to the party on the back of a truck, Milton rides home on a bicycle, and where Laurie and Lucille Guillaume ride a scooter across town (where at least the latter scene has things happening).
The problem gets to be that most of Mads is engaged in shuffling from one location to the other or passing through the party. This is not doing the things that a horror film should be doing in its early sections, which is offering teasing hints of the threat and showing people being affected. We get the one scene with the girl at the start but then it is over half the film watching Milton Riche run around and no real clue what is going on. Even at the end, it is not clear if what we have is a Zombie Film – the infected bite people and turn slavering but never return from the dead – some type of Mass Insanity outbreak, or exactly what.
Eventually, well past the halfway point, some of this Long Take material does start to connect up as horror. There is an okay scene where Lucille Guillaume is riding the scooter with Laurie Pavy as pillion passenger as Laurie starts to become affected and keeps making animal-like snarls and clawing at Lucille’s face as she drives, covering her ears, smearing blood on her face and then trying to bite her neck, ending on the chill cry of “I’m gonna eat your fucking face!” as Lucille rides off. At some point during this, the details we have seen in the background have moved over into a full-on Catastrophe a la The Crazies (1973) as soldiers in riot gear move in and start rounding up and shooting people. There is a fine sequence as Lucille gets to her mother’s apartment but is trapped in the lift as the power goes out where the yelling and sounds coming from outside suggest something increasingly ominous is happening.
It takes a long time to get somewhere but even as it does, Mads leaves you feeling unsatisfied. It is too vague about what is going. I don’t know – I seem to be out of sorts on this one as it made some genre critics’ Top 10 lists for 2024 but left me unmoved where I can only assume they were taken by the novelty of the approach or the end scenes.
Trailer here