Pontypool (2008)

“Sydney Briar is alive. Sydney Briar is alive.”

Pontypool is a slow-burn apocalypse story about a shock jock radio host in small town Ontario who finds himself reporting on some very strange events. As he and his colleagues stay isolated in the basement radio station, they try stay sane as they report on the chaos around town. The film unfolds like radio play, with different community members stopping by the station and calling in. The camera work is simple, but the soundscape is absolutely incredible, creating tension using only descriptions of horrors that we are forced to imagine.

Director Bruce McDonald was inspired by the classic 1938 War of the Worlds radio play in order to adapt Tim Burgess’s novel Pontypool Changes Everything. Though the film and novel have almost nothing to go with each other, Burgess wrote the film to be a kind of forgotten chapter in what he describes as his “fragmented document” of a book. There’s a lot that goes unexplained in this story by design (including some very uncomfortable 2008 brownface that I think is supposed to be a jab at small town racism???), as the people on screen can only speculate about what’s happening.

In Pontypool, some words are infectious, and expressing yourself is deadly. This is a story about communication, love and the inadequacy of words, even when all you do for a living is talk. In 2009, Burgess told Open Book Toronto that this story is “a metaphor for metaphors that keep hunting you long after they’ve been meaningful… Figures of speech that become predatory long after their meaning as figures of speech have left the stage.” It’s also a Valentine’s Day movie!