Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

Former big-shot shock-jock Grant Mazzy is bored: he’s stuck broadcasting a morning show from the basement of a church in tiny Pontypool, Ontario, where reading the obituaries is part of the job and his producer won’t let him have any fun with the listeners. So when a strange and disturbing report of a deadly riot comes in from the station’s traffic reporter, Mazzy leaps to break the story. But details are fuzzy, the eyewitnesses are nearly unintelligible, the details keep getting more gruesome, and the small staff can’t confirm anything from the newswires. Is this an elaborate hoax? A political insurgency? Or the end of the world?

Director Bruce McDonald (THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS, IFFBoston 2008) evokes a “War of the Worlds” scenario that far outshines the recent, massive-scale Steven Spielberg adaptation by taking the exact opposite approach: in place of blockbuster CGI, McDonald concentrates on the special effects of language. Harkening back to genre classics, PONTYPOOL keeps much of the horror offscreen, inviting the audience to imagine their own vision of the events so vividly and terrifyingly described. In the age of torture movies like SAW, this technique is a refreshing departure that respects the audience’s intelligence while relentlessly ratcheting up the suspense. At the same time, the film’s commentary on media exploitation, the virus-like effects of information relay, and the colonizing role of the English language delivers clever laughs amid a cannibalistic melee.

- Kristina Aikens

Screening supported by The Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film