MadS (France 2024) ***

Written and Directed by David Moreau

Nothing in the movie is what it seems.  What appears to be an animal scouring around his car turns out to be an older woman.  Her supposed injury turns out to be something else.

And nothing is what Romain (Milton Riche) has expected.  He never expected to drop his lit cigarette in the car and to shop by the roadside as a result  If not the woman would not have entered his vehicle.   The question also arises whether the audience is put in Romain’s shoes, as he is high as a kite, after experimenting with a new drug at his dealer’s.

Eighteen-year-old Romain has just graduated and makes a stop at his dealer’s place to try a new pill.   He, of course, has snorted a few lines of coke as well.  As he heads off to a party with his girlfriend waiting for him there, hoping to score more drugs, he sees an injured woman on the side of the road and decides to help her, but when she gets in his car, she suddenly smashes her own head against the dashboard, bleeding out until she dies.  So is this a hallucination bad trip? Or is it something else?  One thing is for sure to the audience, it’s only the beginning of the wild night where anything else can happen and probably will.

The film MADS is advertised as a thriller/mystery/horror and works equally well in either of these genres.

Director Moreau ups the ante with strobing lights and weird noises on the soundtrack to let his audience feel the intensity and uneasiness that Romain feels.  It is not helped when his girlfriend Ana shows up and keeps asking him if anything is wrong, and whether it is her.  Things get worse when her friends show up, all intending to have a wild night partying.  While all this is happening, a voiceover goes: “Subject C39 achieved!  Contamination!”

Spoiler alert (this paragraph only:)  For what is lacking in the story - the film has a loose narrative based on the single premise of the end of the world scenario, which it makes up in interspersed scary scenes like the women suddenly appearing all bloodied in Romain’s bathtub or Romain suddenly violently beating up a girl at a party.  Some suspense is also generated with his father, away on business constantly calling Romain asking if everything is all right when obviously, everything is not.  The dad calls Romain at one instant when the alarm in his house goes off, and Romain has to check on what is going on, cycling frantically home to turn off the alarm system.  All the while, he is high on drugs and not wanting the police to show up, though he clearly needs help.  MADS plays like a madcap horror film, which is an intensive watch, making it a standout horror film because the end-of-world scenario has never been done beef this way.

MADS has premiered at several film festivals internationally and opens for streaming on the streaming horror service, Shudder on October 18th.  This one is worth a look.

Trailer: