With its five-star cast and a health epidemic as a backdrop, this Quebec horror film has everything to attract attention. Gold, Brain Freeze, by novice filmmaker Julien Knafo, is not just curiosity. This zombie story, second in its kind since The hungry (Robin Aubert, 2017), is as much worth the detour as the winner of the 2018 Iris deserved.
The temptation to compare the two titles is great. To put it briefly, let’s say that Brain Freeze has few gray areas. Here, everything is explained. The writers (Knafo and Jean Barbe) have planted their story in a polarized Quebec whose wrongs are at the origin of an invasion of zombies. It is about an artificial fertilizer for lawns, but also about a (useless) populist radio host (Simon Oliver Fecteau). The moral lesson (environmentalist) hangs at the end. Fortunately, the plot is unreal enough to be laughed at.
The action takes place in the peaceful and exclusive Île-aux-Paons. The population lives there in a closed community, typically gated city. We find Dan, a valiant and conscientious security guard (Roy Dupuis), his daughter, employed in the golf-club-open-year-round (Marianne Fortier), and a nanny (Claudia Ferri). The working class: in the evening, she returns home, on the other side of the bridge.
The opposition between the rich and the excluded of the Golden Island is only a narrative pretext. Brain Freeze don’t get bogged down. It is a black comedy carried by a good dose of upheavals and tasty scenes, sometimes terrifying, sometimes oddly raw.
Without revealing all the delightful finds, let us quote two: the presence of a human arm, which one carries along like a precious booty, or the appearance of a duo of exterminators (Mylène Mackay and her double), also terrifying than the binoculars of The Shining. We are not far from parody.
The latent tension is based on the dark music of Julien Knafo, composer of his real profession. The plot is based on two characters, Dan (Roy Dupuis) and André (Iani Bédard), a frivolous teenager, cola drinker. The first ends up being a somewhat clumsy survivalist, the second a survivor guided by his innocence.
If Aubert’s zombies are “hungry”, here they are victims, “infected”. In Knafo’s almost social caricature, the monsters are money and those who abuse it are science and its misuse.
The residents of Île-aux-Paons may believe they are immune, the enemy lives among them, in them. No stranger to point out: The infection is spread by an unfaithful man and a careerist mother. Punitive behavior, suggests Knafo. “The rich are crying out alleven the laws of nature ”: the thought of Dan, behind the wheel of his patrol car, sounds the alarm. Of course, no one hears it on this earth where the human peacock, imbued with itself, wanders carefree. Between the metaphor and the lesson, Brain Freeze offers, all in all, a breathtaking entertainment.