Les Affames: French Canadian zombie thriller will have its world premiere at TIFF
Another day, another zombie-centric horror film. But we’re not cynical. We love zombie movies, especially when they’re done with style, flare and offer something novel to the tried and true cannibal corpse shenanigans. In the case of director Robin Aubert’s Les Affames, the twist is that the ghouls in question are French Canadian and infest a small, remote rural Quebec village. Austere scenery smashes up against graphic bloodshed, which you can see in the new clip revealed below.
Aubert introduces his principals in a casual, almost cinema-verité style. They include a well-to-do woman; a young farm boy who has killed his parents; a strangely silent hipster (Monia Chokri) with a suspicious wound that just won’t heal; and the presumptive hero, Bonin (Marc-André Grondin), who has acclimatized to the apocalypse very quickly and may be the only one with a belief in a future.
Les Affamés is punctuated by gallows humour, a steamy, hyper-real look and moments of twitchy surrealism — much of it propelled by the bizarre, often compulsive, behavior of the zombies themselves, who seem to spend most of their time in a trance. The film will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which runs September 7-17. Be on the look out here for a Les Affames review in the coming days.
