MadS (2024) Review

I heard about MadS (2024) from the excellent Colors of the Dark podcast on a morning run, in which the hosts discussed the apocalyptic thriller as one of their top 10 horrors of 2024.

‘Zombies?’, I thought, listening, my ears pricking up, ‘say no more’.

By that evening, I was home, showered, and devouring the film, which I went in to high on expectations. A French end-of-days yarn, shot in one take, released earlier this year to much fanfare (from audiences and critics) – sign me up!

Yet by the time the end credits were rolling, the film had left me feeling strangely cold.

MadS (2024) thrusts us into the story of Romain (Milton Riche), as he picks up drugs from a dealer outside of town. There’s a new narcotic on the table, and Romain partakes, before jumping in his dad’s Mustang and heading home. On his way, smoking in the open-top vehicle, he accidentally drops his cigarette in the card. Fearing for the upholstery, he pulls up on the side of the road. Bad idea. A woman, bandages covering her head and one eye, climbs in. She’s unable to talk and panicking, and looks in dire need of medical attention. Stoned out of his gourd and stressing now, Romain drives straight home as the woman in the shotgun seat – now clearly, visibly, and distressingly ill – begins to throw up blood over his face. He gets back, parking the Mustang in the garage and leaving his passenger (who now appears to have expired) in it as he showers, still visibly shaken.

We meet Romain (Milton Riche) after he picks up drug's at the film's outset.

Soon, Romain’s girlfriend Ana (Laurie Pavy) turns up, and we’re suddenly thrust into the life of this young, hedonistic playboy (who, we learn, is celebrating his birthday) as he’s swept along to a party. He’s clearly out of it, though – and, while at first we attribute that to the traumatising experience we’ve just witnessed him go through – it soon becomes clear Romain is suffering with something. His neck and jaw begin to jerk and twitch; he starts to hear voices goading and laughing at him; he appears disoriented and out of it.

Romain: shaken and stirred.

As the night unfolds and some interesting revelations from Romain’s personal life are surfaced – in one strange scene, Ana’s best friend Julia (Lucille Guillame) reveals to Ana not only that she’s been sleeping with her boyfriend Romain, but that she’s potentially pregnant with his baby – MadS tells the story of Romain’s rapidly deteriorating malady set against the backdrop of a wild party. I won't spoil what unfurls next – the remainder of this MadS review is mostly spoiler-free – but I do explain the ending of MadS (2024) below.

One thing I did find interesting about MadS is that it never spoon feeds us any information about what’s going on – something that may be as much of a creative decision as a natural result of the film’s decision to shoot its action in a single, 86-minute take. The lack of cutaways means we’re deprived of a solid backstory for the introduction of our patient zero and the contagion that follows (although we do get regular snippets of audio suggesting she was imprisoned and experimented on in some kind of laboratory) – and this adds to the overall mystery and intrigue of the thing. MadS is happy for us to believe that what we witness throughout the film is caused either by some kind of blood-borne virus OR the drug Romain ingests – and then subsequently gives to Ana and Julia – at the film’s outset.

MadS never makes it explicitly clear whether the film's events are caused by an infection, a drug – or even both.

This second theory doesn’t hold much water – especially when the military, or whatever shadowy organisation has been behind this whole thing, turn up and start shooting people – but it is constantly alluded to as characters repeatedly refer to the events of the evening (and the worsening effects of the contagion) as a “bad trip”. Which is apt, because the whole film is shot – purposefully, no doubt – to mimic the disorienting, discombobulating effects of drug and alcohol use. The close, claustrophobic handheld camerawork shunts us along with Romain as he moves through a crowded party; strobe lights put us off balance; long tracking shots give the characters no peace from the camera’s gaze – and give us no peace from the horrors unfolding before our eyes. It’s the closest I can remember seeing on film to the actual effects of being too drunk or high at a party, and the sickening dread you feel when you realise it. Dread, here, is definitely the right word – and the whole thing has a shade of that unrelenting feel popularised by some of the endurance horrors (think Terrifier 3, The Sadness) that have risen to prominence in the last few years.

Personally, that style isn’t massively my bag – and, judging by MadS’ glowing reviews from the horror community online, I’m in the minority here – but yeah. By the end of the film, I was left thinking…so what? I mentioned the movie being shot in a way that felt hard to escape from, yet it was also hard to escape the idea that MadS – beyond the gimmick of being a one-shot film in the style of Victoria (2015) or the first half-hour or so of One Cut of the Dead (2017) didn’t have all that much on its mind. Drugs are, err…bad? Yes, it was fast – fierce – furious – unrelenting. But for me, these elements work best when in service of some deeper themes; where there’s at least a kernel or two of hope buried beneath the rubble.

Ana (Laurie Pavy) flees by velo through the streets.

Another thing I couldn’t get past was some of the bizarre writing. In one aforementioned scene, for instance – when Julia tells her best friend Ana, in the bathroom, that she slept with her boyfriend – the line is delivered so flippantly. The two don’t even fall out… Ana just walks away. Then immediately after, Julia exits the bathroom into the corridor and starts hooking up with Romain. While getting together, she tells him his eyes look weird (later revealed to be a telltale sign of the infection) and, after he checks himself out in the mirror, Julia has simply disappeared.

We see stuff like this all through the film. In one scene, Ana – who also starts showing signs of the infection, and is being chased by the gunmen of the organisation brought in to control the outbreak’s spread – is in a bar, hiding in the bathroom. The gunmen begin slaughtering everyone in the bar at will, and we see – through the glass pane in the bathroom door – one of them come right up to the bathroom where Ana is hiding. We see the silhouette, Ana is in there squealing with terror and yelling into her phone…yet the gunman doesn’t enter!

Still, you have to respect the game of the one-shot approach – one that director David Moreau has since confirmed was actually one-shot (rather than the many ‘hidden’ cuts most one-shot movies employ). What I also liked was how the film is a de facto portmanteau film: following first Romain, then Ana, then Julia as the night wears on. It’s a kind of anthology film, with each story running parallel and tying into the wider narrative, yet acting as discrete, almost self-contained tales within themselves. (Now, if you’d have told me this was both a zombie film and an anthology, I’d have been excited!)

MadS gives us a bit of teen drama amidst the bloodshed.

Ultimately, MadS (2024) will win many hearts and minds for its gung-ho, no-holds-barred approach to tackling the tropes of a (by now well-worn) genre. And on another day, I might have loved it. But for me, the film casts aside most of what should be its key elements – such as a solid plot and decent characterisation – in favour of more technical ones: most obviously, the single-take approach. It’s a classic case of style over substance, or – in more traditional zombie parlance – simply not enough meat on the bones to tuck into.

MadS (2024) Ending Explained: Was Julia Infected?

Oh, you bet your bottom dollar she was.

In MadS's final scene, Julia makes her way back to her apartment after enduring a horrifying pursuit from the zombified Ana – a large part of that with her erstwhile best friend trying to infect her from the back of her moped – and encounters a member of the gun-toting organisation that killed Romain (and who pursued Ana for a large section of the movie's middle segment). The gunwoman explains a few of the aspects of the infected to Julia (namely, that they're attracted to light) before having her leg clawed by Julia.

Julia (Lucille Guillame) will think twice before giving a drunk mate a ride on her moped again.

The gunwoman – knowing she's infected, and that she may only have mere moments left – kills herself: leaving Julia, alone and distraught, in the apartment.

Soon, though, Julia's sobs turn to maniacal laughter, which – after we saw first Romain, and then Ana, cackle in the same way shortly before becoming consumed by the throes of the disease – we know is a telltale sign of the infection at the heart of MadS's plot.

So yes, Julia too is infected (and it's not surprising given her ordeal on the moped – I mean, just look at that screenshot above!) and to be honest, it doesn't look good for the rest of the world, either. Au revoir!

Need some zombies in your life? Shamblers come in all shapes and sizes. Check out my reviews of Handling the Undead (2024), Braindead (1992), and Night of the Living Dead (1990) to compare and contrast some of the most diverse iterations of the undead.