French "Zombi Child" Calls Upon Voodoo Tropes

We don’t often see the traditional African-Haitian zombie trope in contemporary cinema, but French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello has made use of this icon of colonial slavery in his new film Zombi Child. The folkloristic zombie — a corpse revived by a powerful magician for the purpose of providing free agricultural labor — is used by the director to address contemporary issues of racism and an ongoing legacy of class-based biases within modern French society.

With dual narratives, the film begins in 1962 with the burial of recently deceased Clairvius Narcisse, his awakening from the grave with aphasic and amnesiac, and forced into labor on the sugarcane fields each night.

The story of Clairvius and his gradual reclamation of speech, memory, and social freedom is interspersed with the present-day life of his granddaughter Melissa as she makes friends and comes to recognize the invisible and unspoken structures of power as gradually revealed in the workings of an elite Parisian girl’s school.

Andrew Spitznas, blogging for the Patheos website, emphasizes the intellectual strength of the film, noting that the director-screenwriter not only uses Zombi Child to examine experiences of otherness, disenfranchisement, cannibalistic capitalism, mourning and loss, but also to interrogate the arguments of influential European intellectuals and philosophers.

Jonathan Romney said in his ScreenDaily review of the film after viewing it at the Cannes Film Festival: "Mixing political commentary, ethnography, teenage melodrama and genre horror, the film is an unashamedly cerebral study of multiple themes — colonialism, revolution, liberalism, racial difference and female desire — with its unconventional narrative structure taking us a journey that’s as intellectually demanding as it is compelling."

The film’s narrative structure leads to what Slant magazine reviewer Sam C. Mac calls “a feverish payoff, one that uses genre and supernatural elements to further Bonello’s idea of there being one historical continuity.”

All reviewers agree in identifying Bonello’s Zombi Child as a work of supernatural horror developed upon the fertile soil of sociopolitical critique. Bonello said in an interview that both his interest in French history and the Romero zombie encouraged him to look backward to the Voodoo origins of the modern horror icon.

"I wanted to trace (the pop horror icon) to its origins, to something much more real and human," Bonello said, "because these people (zombies of folklore), they’re not dead — theoretically they’re people that don’t find a place in hell, so they come back to earth. They’re alive, they’re between life and death, between night and day."

Here’s a link to an English-subtitled trailer, though as is so often the case with YouTube you’re going to have to sit through a few seconds of advertisement before you can go directly to the trailer. As far as I can tell, the film is not yet available for sale or streaming.