Written and directed by Bertrand Bonello
Starring: Louise Labeque, Wislanda Louimat and Katiana Milfort
Running time: 1 hour and 43 minutes

by Ryan Smillie

“When the anthropologists appear, the Gods depart.”-purported Haitian proverb 

In 1789, the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in the colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), a group of free blacks appealed to the Declaration’s assertion that all men were free and equal to demand the right to vote. The French colonial government denied the appeal and violently crushed a brief insurgency against the decision. In return, the population of African and African-descended slaves, who outnumbered the European colonists nearly ten to one, launched a revolt that ended with the abolition of slavery, the expulsion of the French colonial government, and the independence of Haiti.

Centuries later, the legacies of these two revolutions serve as the basis for Bertrand Bonello’s horror-adjacent Zombi Child. Bonello cuts between two timelines - Haiti in the 1960s, where a man (inspired by the disputed real-life story of Clairvius Narcisse) is killed, turned into a zombi, and forced to work on a sugar plantation, and present-day Paris, where the man's granddaughter, Mélissa, orphaned and displaced following the 2010 Haitian earthquake, falls in with a group of white girls at her exclusive boarding school. While no stranger to complex explorations of French society, Bonello falls short in his latest effort with a film that is both overly ambitious and too slight. 

From the opening shots of a voodoo curse and Clairvius’s (Mackenson Bijou) zombi resurrection, it becomes clear that the film is more atmospheric than anything else. Despite Bonello’s typically striking and evocative imagery (this time lensed by Yves Cape, in his first collaboration with Bonello), Zombi Child seems to be content with establishing an eerie mood and only hinting at themes, or even a plot. Though rich with suggestion - Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat) is not only the granddaughter of a zombi, but also the daughter of an investigator of human rights abuses under the Duvalier regime in Haiti; the boarding school is the Maison d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur, a school founded by Napoleon following the French Revolution and only open to girls descended from Légion d’honneur recipients; school discussions seem to always refer back to values inherited either from the Revolution or the students’ ancestors - the ideas never coalesce into a clear thought.

Towards the end of the film, Fanny (Louise Labeque), Mélissa’s closest friend at school, surreptitiously seeks out Mélissa’s aunt, Katy (Katiana Milfort), a mambo (voodoo priestess). Fanny begs Katy to perform a ritual so that Fanny can reach the soul of the boy she loves. It is not that simple, Katy warns; she can’t just start the ceremony, “you need to know the culture.” While this does not dissuade Fanny from insisting on going forward with the ritual, it seems an apt criticism of the film. Though the depictions of Haiti and voodoo practices are used for more than just titillation or suspense, they are clearly shot from an outsider’s perspective. Bonello clearly has a lot on his mind with Zombi Child - legacies of revolution and colonialism, relations between France and its former colonies, economic exploitation, even the use of cultural practices as horror tropes - but I wonder what a film tackling the same subjects would look like coming from a Haitian point of view.

*Opens in select theaters beginning January 24th, more theaters to follow