Zombi Child movie reviews & Metacritic score: Haiti, 1962. The drama follows the story of 12-year-old Ray (Billy Barratt, an actor the same age as his character, who turns in a credible and heartbreaking performance) and his 23-year-old brother, Nathan (James Tarpey doing likewise), living under the tyranny of their mother’s boyfriend, Scott. and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango. Given the promise of the pitch, it’s too bad Zombi Child never provides the genuine scares of a genre movie nor fully explores the Haitian mythology at … She is there mostly to deliver snippets of legalese and look pained; he to look frustrated and avow on the stand that a child’s brain is less developed than an adult’s. Coming Soon. But this is the 21st-century version: the men have drowned during a Mediterranean crossing, like thousands of others. "Zombi Child" seeks to interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism, from its brutal applications in the past to its spiritual and psychological reverberations in the present. The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Just below that it reads "Ticket Confirmation#:" followed by a 10-digit number. Coming Soon. Join here. It's a wafting, interior movie, more 'I Walked with a Zombie' than 'Night of the Living Dead,' more whisper than scream. [Director Bertrand] Bonello still admirably goes against the ongoing customs within the zombie genre by depicting its roots and making Zombi Child an instructive mood piece. This does make the finale a bit jarring but that does not undermine the film's interrogations of history. It draws from a variety of cases, but is perhaps most directly based on the 2014 case of Jerome Ellis, aged 14, and his 23-year-old brother, Joshua, who stabbed their abusive stepfather to death as he lay on the family sofa. Somebody could write a whole thesis on the night-time rap scene or the moment a privileged white child essentially plays the race-card to guilt trip a black woman into helping her.All of which confirms Bertrand Bonello as one of the most interesting and talented voices in French cinema right now.Sadly, in the final act, which manages to be a huge shift in tone while being oddly predictable at the same time, the movie falls into the double trap of exoticism and sensationalism and it inadvertently becomes the very thing it tries to critique.Despite its best intentions, Zombi Child remains very much a white man's film. |, August 26, 2020 The 25 Best Console Launch Games (Since 2000), Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One. [Director Bertrand] Bonello still admirably goes against the ongoing customs within the zombie genre by depicting its roots and making Zombi Child an instructive mood piece. Cannes 2019: Zombi Child Review Alistair Ryder. | Rotten (12). Bertrand Bonello's excellent supernatural thriller blends Haitian folklore previously covered by Wes Craven with girls at a Parisian prep school. |, January 23, 2020 It is told in two timeframes. Bertrand Bonello’s quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract. |, February 1, 2020 A man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In the island’s mythology, the controller was normally a sorcerer who had raised a body from the dead in order to enslave it as source of free, if gormless, labour. Is it something to do with cultural borrowing by former colonial powers, or that this appropriation means the once-oppressed now can possess their oppressors? Your AMC Ticket Confirmation# can be found in your order confirmation email. Bonello, though, is not a black film-maker, and Zombi Child comes with a sting in its tail.