Review

Bruce McDonald’s Wittgensteinian Canadian zombie-plague picture Pontypool doesn’t jell—its pretensions way exceed its reach—yet it’s madly suggestive, and it rekindled my affection for the genre. It’s based on a novel by Tony Burgess, but the setup is pure theater: four main characters trapped in a radio station in rural Ontario, where an egghead incarnation of Don Imus (the acid Stephen McHattie) has been exiled. From scattered news reports and calls, it emerges that mobs are inexplicably killing and eating people. Afghanistan and the Middle East have a tangential relationship to the carnage, but the virus transcends contemporary politics.Language itself seems to have broken down. Pontypool is, in all senses, brain food—and juicy. — David Edelstein