As MadS (2024) opens, the camera pans back from what turns out to be an image of a woman’s agonised face; you could call it foreshadowing, or perhaps it’s just an incidental feature, an arty poster on the wall of an apartment being used for a drug deal, as a young man called Romain (Milton Riche) does more than a few lines before heading out into the cold light of day. He rapidly enters a state of Peak Bravado before hopping into his dad’s vintage Mustang and heading off to join his sometime girlfriend and their other friends for an evening soiree. The evening already has ‘interesting’ written all over it. He’s off his tits. What could go wrong?
The film’s first shock is when, as Romain pulls up to inspect the car’s leatherwork after he drops his cigarette, a young woman comes out of nowhere and approaches his vehicle. She can’t speak, but she’s clearly distressed and he, for obvious reasons, doesn’t really want the police involved. He decides he’s going to take her to the nearest hospital, but she grows ever more agitated, clearly fearful of being followed, and handily for the plot, she’s also clutching a tape recorder which relays some very concerning information about where she’s been and what’s been done to her (which goes straight over Romain’s head at first, it seems, but at least we can listen). Bereft of sane ideas, he changes tack and drives the woman back to his place and, well, if he was worried about his seat leather before, then it’s safe to say things get rapidly worse. We’re faced with a young man used to a life of ease and comfort, high on drugs, and trying to balance all of the mundane details which continue to unfold around him with a bizarre situation he would clearly rather forget.
Like the very best of the New French Extremity titles – one of which, Ils (2006), was directed by the director of MadS, David Moreau – this film makes a hell of an entrance, all whilst whisking us along with its slick production values and carefully curated sensory overload; the film is a visual and aural feat. It also aims to run as one long, unflinching take and invests a lot of time and care into this sustaining this idea, which really helps to capture something of the strangeness of the unfolding situation, and the plight of each protagonist in turn. Starting with Romain, it’s clear that he and his friends are careless people, blasé, a little antagonistic and patently unsuited to any kind of crisis. These are party people, and it turns out that partying is far from the ideal environment for what is about to happen. But off Romain goes: is his behaviour due to a bad trip, or something else? Oh, and just to add insult to injury, it’s his birthday, too.
It’s hard not to take on some of Romain’s headspace as the film unfolds, so much time do we first spend with this character, and it’s also worth saying that many films have done more than enough with the whole bad trip idea to make a decent film, without the addition of any other plot points: the bad trip here is particularly immersive. However, MadS continues to broaden in scope, in ambitious and brutal ways. Like Martyrs (2008) – probably the last true line in the sand for New French Extremity titles – there’s the same sense of a bigger picture, an ‘intellectually curious’ organisation with a vested interest in experimentation.
But unlike Martyrs, MadS doesn’t decide to narrow its focus onto one individual and their plight, and instead scans around, picking up the same story through the experiences of others. The fact that you can pick up on a few sets of influences doesn’t mean that this film feels samey or particularly derivative, either: it feels fresh and exciting. Things tick along quickly, and the film never fully dehumanises its key characters, so that you are always left wondering how much of them is still there. Full exposition isn’t the film’s thing, but that’s because of its unerring focus on its people, who have to ask the same questions as we do. MadS is another great calling card for Shudder, a streaming service with a growing and impressive roster of original titles, and an entertaining, bold, well-made film.
MadS (2024) is available to stream now.