MadS (2024) Film Review - You Only Get One Shot

MadS (2024) introduces us to a group of affluent French teenagers as they prepare for an evening of local house parties on the rural edge of an unnamed town. Romain (Milton Riche), dressed in shorts and an unbuttoned designer shirt, is seen visiting his dealer, snorting some unknown red powder, before jumping into his father’s pristine Mustang soft top. He goes through the picturesque French countryside, blaring loud Euro indie, as the sun goes down and he starts coming up—so far so Quentin Tarantino.

It’s only when a dropped cigarette forces him to pull up on the roadside, that a mute, bandaged, and clearly distressed young woman climbs in with him that his plans for the night take an increasingly chaotic turn for the worse.

Caution: Spoilers Ahead

Director David Moreau has the paedophobic Ils (Them 2006 and 2008’s The Eye) under his horror belt and, in this offering, he opts for a continued sense of unsteady realism by only using one camera and filming the entirety in one take. This technique successfully ramps up the film’s uncertainty as you take it in turns to follow each of the three main characters as they try, and fail, to come to terms with what is happening to them and their provincial town.

Tracking each character allows the audience to empathise with their bizarre, and increasingly traumatic, experiences, and better conveys the woozy, often dream-like effects they each undergo as the night progresses. Having the film start with the partaking of unknown drugs only increases the uncertainty as each of the young revelers could easily be undergoing a particularly bad trip. This possibility did have me questioning the reality of early scenes as such a conclusion would surely be preferable, and certainly more plausible, for the characters themselves, than the world-ending horror that is later proved to be developing all around them.

Taking place throughout one night, the film is full of darkness and shadows contrasted, at first, to red and yellow party glows and artfully brooding domestic lighting. The teens gaze up in wonder at the white, heavenly spotlights that take more and more of their attention as the night moves on.

Throughout the film many of society’s trusted support networks fail to help the youngsters as parents are absent, phone calls to the police only get demoralizing phone messages, and insincere helplines offer no help at all, and merely echo the collapse which is taking hold.

The European setting and variety of single-person tracking shots, which follow characters as they run, drive, cycle and even moped through suburban streets, rural fields, and alongside rivers, brought Run Lola Run (1998) to mind. The youthful drug-fuelled night out setting had me reminiscing about 1999’s Go, and Human Traffic, though this film has little really in common with them, and instead ramps up for an infected final third comparable to Rec (2007) and Romero’s The Crazies (1973).

MadS is, after all, a horror film that focuses on the drug-blurred experiences of three teenagers, whose evening plans happen to coincide with a humanity-ending viral outbreak. The performances are surprisingly good and suitably realistic, convincingly portraying the gradual shift from stoned reveler, desperate for help, to blood-crazed infected, added to by the single take direction which makes MadS feel as though it could find a home alongside Found footage features, documenting the early stages of a zombie plague or outbreak of a civilisation ending contagion. Because of its engaging camera work and original attempts at reworking an all too often-tired horror trope, I can forgive its elements of forced contrivance, required to push the story along, the unnecessary teen dramatics, and its attempts at explaining the rules of this particular infection to try and make it stand apart from your basic feral cannibalism. This is a pleasing and far more entertaining addition to the infected genre than it really has any right to be. A great little hidden gem that’s well worth checking out.