Zom­bi Child

The dead may have been walk­ing among the liv­ing for decades with­out caus­ing a stir. They move and they moan, their bod­ies work and their eyes see, but they do not feel. These peo­ple are real, and for greed or for hon­our, they have been zomb­i­fied, forced to par­tial­ly die before their time, and to con­tin­ue a life that isn’t theirs. Peo­ple are turned into slaves. In Zom­bi Child, direc­tor Bertrand Bonel­lo dives into the crevices of Hait­ian his­to­ry to spot­light these truths, tran­scend­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of fic­tion­al terror.

Offer­ing more than colour­ful doc­u­men­tary or con­spir­a­to­r­i­al pro­pa­gan­da, the facts spring­board Bonello’s own clever nar­ra­tive. The film­mak­er estab­lish­es the death and sec­ond life of Clairvius Nar­cisse (the Hait­ian man who made head­lines in 1962) in par­al­lel with the life of his teenage grand­daugh­ter Mélis­sa (Bonello’s fic­tion­al cre­ation) as she tries to fit in at a strict French board­ing school, which girls can only attend if their father, grand­fa­ther or great-grand­fa­ther has been award­ed the Légion d’honneur.

Mélis­sa isn’t ashamed of her roots, but her new friends are much more flip­pant. ​“Is she cool, or is she weird?”, they ask each oth­er before tak­ing a chance. Imme­di­ate val­i­da­tion is cru­cial, as these girls are firm­ly mould­ed accord­ing to the mer­it that pre­cedes them – here, hon­our is hered­i­tary. They parade their indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ties after hours, singing lewd rap songs like holy chants and wear­ing stick-on stars like warpaint.

Fan­ny, the leader of the pack and Mélissa’s first friend, stim­u­lates her spir­it by writ­ing sweet noth­ings to her fleet­ing sum­mer romance, Pablo. When the boy breaks her heart, Fanny’s des­per­a­tion search­es for any kind of anti­dote. Her now love­less world col­lides with Mélissa’s super­nat­ur­al fam­i­ly ties: the intox­i­cat­ing mys­tery of mag­ic beyond her doorstep is magnetic.

The rat­tling of a cof­fin and the unrest of a repressed teenag­er form a per­fect pair of fears, teth­ered by Bonello’s deft sto­ry­telling that explores the gaps between what it means to have a life and how it feels to live it. A his­to­ry les­son turns into a hor­ror movie and super­sti­tion gives way to an out-of-body thrill ride, but Bonel­lo nev­er drops the ball.

Phan­tas­mal flash­es lit­ter an oth­er­wise lucid and some­what didac­tic inter­pre­ta­tion of voodoo cul­ture, as Zom­bi Child posits an enlight­en­ing jour­ney through tra­di­tion­al mythol­o­gy as much haunt­ed mod­ern youth. It gets under your skin, with the auda­cious and cun­ning mys­tique of a magi­cian who always has one more trick pre­pared. Bonel­lo leaves us hyp­no­tised and hun­gri­ly beg­ging for more.