Bertrand Bonello’s most famous film, “House of Tolerance,” showed his affinity for collapsing the supposed distance between the past and present, proving to his audience we haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think. His last film, the controversial “Nocturama,” a fantasia of terrorism and capitalism intertwined, proved he was unafraid to explore hot button issues using both genre techniques and art film bravado. His latest, “Zombi Child,” is an ambitious reframing of zombies and their voodoo roots as an echo of the trauma of slavery and colonialism, the legacy of forces still shaping our world today.
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Zombies have become annoyingly common in recent years, yet the most popular examples use them as grim exercises in survivalism; few recent stories have meaningfully questioned the explicitly Haitian roots of the zombie mythos. Bonello begins “Zombi Child” in Haiti, 1962, with a detailed look at a voodoo ritual down to the ingredients. The spell casts down Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), only for him to be resurrected and put to work cutting sugarcane as a zombie slave. A chance bite of chicken returns some of his faculties and he returns to his wife, eventually recovering his memory and a normal life.
The story’s other thread takes place in modern Paris, in the confines of an elite boarding school where new girl Melissa (Wislanda Louimat) tries to fit in. The school’s only black student, Melissa is a refugee from the earthquake in Haiti who lives on the social outskirts until Fanny (Louise Labeque) takes an interest in her based on their shared tastes in horror. The two girls seem destined to be friends; they have chemistry together, but they also share a withdrawn quality, a sense of untold secrets. Fanny is reeling from the separation from her first love (another form of physical “belonging”), whom the audience only sees in comical shirtless dream scenes in a forest. Fanny is a member of a sorority and persuades them to initiate Melissa, though the others aren’t as enamored of her “weird” qualities. The initiation, which Bonello stages in candlelit mystery similar to the earlier voodoo incantation, requires Melissa to reveal her innermost passion to be deemed worthy and she recites a poem testifying to the collective pain of the Haitian people embodied in the zombie myth.
The girls’ plumbing of Melissa’s identity both inspires Melissa to reconsider her ties to Haiti and somewhat unsettles the French girls, especially when they learn the aunt Melissa lives with is a voodoo mambo. Bonello allows the aunt to eloquently defend voodoo as a potent force connecting Haitians in a larger community, both home and abroad, living and dead. The speech is delivered to Fanny, who goes behind Melissa’s back to ask her aunt for a voodoo solution to her boy troubles. The aunt warns her against meddling with such powers for trivial purposes, but relents in the face of money, with devastating results.
One would think the Haitian-set zombie thread of the story would feel more horror-esque, but Bonello endows these scenes with a wordless beauty, a beguiling fairy tale quality. On the other hand, the school scenes are much more playful and overtly horror-feeling, gesturing towards both giallo and coming of age tropes and styles while retaining the keen sense of the contemporary values seen in “Nocturama.” The parallel stories evoke a heady mix of themes – diasporic dislocation, the idea of belonging to someone, intergenerational guilt, cultural appropriations both small and large, the modern need to perform one’s identity.
Like his other recent films, “Zombi Child” looks and sounds beautiful, lush, and immersive – writer-directors this intellectually ambitious are rarely such seductive stylists as well. In general, “Zombi Child” is a bit overstuffed, with more ideas and styles than it can develop successfully. While the thematic connections between the two threads are undeniable, the ending doesn’t tie them together as neatly as one would hope. Additionally, the ending sees Fanny take focus from the more interesting Melissa, whose interactions with her peers are latent with energy that remains mostly unresolved.
Still, this overstuffed quality to the film is thrilling to watch, because it truly feels like anything is possible as Bonello teases different directions the film might head. “Zombi Child” is the rare film that’s both rich in ideas and fun, a reckoning with forces colonial powers would like buried, but that won’t stay dead. [B+]
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