Mutants

French horror has a renaissance. Some of the movies that came out in the last few years have been really nice, so I thought I should check out the latest addition to the genre.

A virus has spread through the population. Victims mutate and become cannibals. There is only one hope, a military station called NOAH. Sonia, a medic and her friend Marco have to stop at an abandoned housing complex in the middle of the forest because Marco has a gunshot wound and their car is out of gas…

Mutants feels like a movie that is cut'n'pasted from different zombie movies. The characters are shallow, the plot unmotivated. A friend of mine often says "the trailer is better than the movie will be". That is the case with Mutants as well. A few exciting scenes, and unfortunately, that's it…

Opinion: 4/10 – Nothing new, kinda slow paced, maybe something for the hardcore Zombie-Fan

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A french horror movie that plays more like a psychological horror than a full on horror movie. The director made a short, that is setting up the mood for this film. He even uses one actor from the short and if I'm not completely mistaken, you could say, that it continues exactly where the short movie stopped/ended.

As a psychological film it really works. It doesn't have that much scares though and it might not be bloody enough for some people. While it's not pitch perfect, it's a nice watch. So if you want a horror movie with a little brain (no pun intended), then you can certainly give this a try.

France. A country know for real bad movies that only the French appreciate. But a sudden change a few years ago with Haute Tension has put that country on the horror map. And the holy three, Martyrs, Frontiere(s) and Inside has made an impact that France became the leader into the brutal gore scene. Men could only expect that it would always be like that. So France delivered us Mutants. It won't be much acclaimed as the holy three. The reason is that the others had some creepy brutal suspense. Here you can see things going typical for flesh eating mutants. Not that the movie is bad but the storyline is so simple , as always with that kind of movies. Being trapped, contamination, being bitten by a mutant, changing in a mutant, mutant appears before lover,...but before you out there are killing me, the effects really match up to French norms. And that makes the movie. If you adore gore watch it, if you like cannibals too otherwise just forget it.

When a deadly virus spreads out through France in the summertime, the great part of the population is mow down. The last hope of the survivors is the military station called Noah, a hidden sanctuary where scientists are researching the cure. Dr. Sonia (Hélène de Fougerolles), her beloved boyfriend Marco (Francis Renaud) and the military Perez (Marie-Sohna Conde) seek Noah driving an ambulance in a lonely road through the woods, but they run out of gas. There is an incident with a zombie with a shootout and Perez dies and Marco is hit in the stomach and contaminated by the zombie's blood. Sonia heads to an apartment complex and she lodges with Marco in the desert place; while healing his wound, Sonia tries to contact Noah. But sooner Sonia finds out that the location is indeed inhabited and she is in danger.

"Mutants" has the same premise of most of zombie movies, i.e., an outbreak of a virus that transforms most of the population into zombies. However, the difference in this gore movie is the dramatic plot with the love and fear of Sonia for Marco, and the claustrophobic situation that the lead actress is involved. Further, the high-level of the performances of Hélène de Fougerolles and Francis Renaud also make the difference, unusual in the horror genre. The awesome landscape with snow and the make-up are also stunning. The conclusion is a cliché for a possible sequel. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Mutações" ("Mutations")

In its very first minute, Mutants reminds us that in order to survive the inevitable zombie apocalypse, it is best not to get too attached to anyone or anything.

And of course, the problem is that it is very easy to say that, but much harder to put theory into practice. The difficulty with zombies, besides the fact that they are the tireless, ravenous living dead is that they are monsters with the faces of our loved ones. Random zombies are a problem, but one that can be solved with ruthless application of violence. From Romero's Night of the Living Dead to Robert Kirkland's Walking Dead the most difficult zombies haven't been the faceless hordes, but the zombies that we knew when they were human, our sons, daughters, parents and lovers.

The zombies being offered in Mutants are viral mutants similar to the ones in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, but where Boyle's film gave us a transformation that was almost simultaneous with infection, Mutants offers a much crueler plight. It imagines a delay between infection to full viral mutation of about four days. The cruelty of a long and painful transformation (in this case strongly reminiscent of Cronenberg's The Fly) is that it offers the illusion that a cure is possible. In this case, the main character, Sonia, is a medical professional. (It is unclear if she is a doctor or a nurse.) Sonia's identity is vested in her belief that any disease can be cured, that her infected lover Marco can be saved and she has secrets that help convince her that a cure is possible, even likely.

This is heresy for zombie affliction afficionados, where the only true cure for infection is immediate amputation, but by flirting with heresy, Mutants asks some compelling questions. In the process, it offers an eloquent elegy to the moral quandary of euthanasia.

At what point is medical treatment crueler than death? At what point has your loved one become so consumed by disease that all that they were and all that they could be have been replaced by the disease? Where does humanity end and death begin? Bad enough to be faced with those impossible questions, but Morlet ups the ante on Sonia by reminding us that the inevitable zombie apocalypse is not just about the zombies, it is also about the apocalypse - the end of everything. The end of easy transportation, the end of gas, the end of warmth, the end of light, the end of communication, the end of parts, the end of bullets, the end of civility, the end of love and the end of trust.

The film is not perfect. It uses a but too much of the shock-cam technique currently in vogue. There are also a couple of steps in the mutation that make little sense. Mutant zombies losing their hair makes sense, but losing their teeth? Really? The reason that the zombie apocalypse is inevitable has everything to do with our voracious and insatiable appetite that will eventually overcome and overwhelm our ability to feed it. The zombie apocalypse is the contrast between the death of our ability to feed the hunger and the dark monstrous face of that hunger lying just behind the mask of civility.

David Morel reminds us in Mutants not just of that inevitability, but also that when the end comes it will be both painful and beautiful, and that the barrier between life and death, love and hate, civilization and chaos is not a barrier that is crossed in an instant. It is one that is crossed so slowly and the hair, the blood, the fluids and all the mess of life and living shed in the crossing are so distracting that by the time you know that you have passed the tipping point, it is too late to turn back.