Halloween 2012 Day 6: Pontypool (2009)

Language is a sticky thing. Open to a certain amount of interpretation, it also has very concrete meanings. Attacking and dissolving these meanings is an important aspect of art and rhetoric but we have to remember that, while those things reflect our lives, they are guided by a separate set of rules. Language may evolve and change but in order to communicate effectively we must stand on somethings in the short term.
In Bruce McDonald and Tony Burgess' Pontypool, we're taken to a world where the English language has become hostile. Words are contagious but only the words, not the meaning they contain. In the film, meaning can be conveyed through non-verbal or non-English means. This raises some interesting questions as far as the motives of the virus, or at least whoever released it. If your virus is that advanced that he can transmit itself via a specific, almost theoretical means, why does it attack just the language and not the ideas it conveys? Are the Quebecois separatists the movie mentions mostly in passing, and quickly dismisses, the source? Reading it with that assumption, the film draws a mostly uncomfortable parallel between the Block Quebecois and the Third Reich.
That parallel along with much of its content makes this a distinctly Canadian film. Canada is swiftly becoming a kind of low-budget horror powerhouse. Pontypool makes the most of its small budget by setting it mostly in a radio studio with a cast of few more than four people, plus voices we hear over the phone and through windows and so on. This setting owes quite a bit to Welles' adaptation of the War of the Worlds and manages to take that mantle and do it justice. The scripting is very tight and the acting is definitely up to the task. An interesting movie with an interesting moral, to say the least.