2018, Daniel Roby (Louis Cyr) -- download
This is a movie I recall seeing the trailer of around the time it was coming out, and then... entirely forgot about it. Something about the "standard horror experience" but in another culture appeals to me. This movie is The Mist except there's nothing in the mist but ... mist. The mist itself kills people, leaving us with an almost epidemic/infection movie as people shelter in place, hoping to wait it out, or for the government to come and save them. Also kind of explains why they didn't go with the straight English translation of the French movie -- "In the Mist".
Its funny, but as you get on writing this, you are going to comment that it wasn't actually horror.
Mathieu (Romain Duris, Eiffel) and Anna (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace) are raising their daughter Sarah in central Paris. Sarah is a "girl in a bubble", as she has an auto-immune syndrome and has to be kept in an atmosphere controlled chamber. Soon after introducing the characters, there is a mild earthquake, something unheard of in Paris. Mathieu is out when it occurs and is witness to clouds of brown smoke billowing forth from the ground. While it is not strictly seen, the idea of running from a massive gaseous substance that appears out of nowhere is not abnormal; nor is reacting as others are -- screaming, fleeing crowds instill the same instinct on Mathieu.
He makes it to his quaint apartment building, grabs his wife and they both flee upstairs to the top floor owned by an elderly couple. The mist only climbs so high, not into the apartment. From a rooftop vantage point Mathieu confirms the mist only reaches to a certain height, and he can even see people collecting at the distant Montmartre. They are safe, for now. But their daughter, who is also safe in her bubble, has only so much time before the batteries fail.
Not a horror movie, just a survival one, which I am sure I would normally label as a sub-genre. Survival Thriller maybe? The only thing against Mathieu and his family is time, and the mist. First, secure replacement batteries. Mathieu can hold his breath long enough to reach the apartment of a neighbour who used an oxygen bottle. That allows him to venture outside long enough to run into a crowd of people being led by the military to Monmartre. He is given a couple of oxygen masks & tanks but not pressured to join. But eventually even extra batteries will run out, and eventually they notice the mist is creeping higher, centimetre by centimetre, very very slowly. They need to collect a "bubble suit" from a research facility they were working with, on Sarah's condition. Unfortunately that does not go as planned, the couple get separated, and Anna returns with barely enough time to switch out Sarah's last battery.... but not to climb back to the top floor.
There is also a subplot about Sarah wanting her father to check-in on another boy in another bubble in a nearby apartment complex. She has a few friends all with her condition connected only by a now non-existent internet. And then the crux of the movie, the revelation that moves it entirely out of the realm of horror or even survival. Mathieu is desperate to find something to get Sarah out of the bubble and somewhere to safety. His wife is gone, the apartment will soon be flooded by the mist and his daughter is all he cares about. But as he is riding a scooter to claim her last chance, he is distracted and falls. Distracted by a boy walking freely in the mist. It is Noé, the boy his daughter was friends with. And as the batteries were dying on her bubble, she got herself out and joins them, for her father's last breath, but for her first free of any confines.
The movie ends with children running free in fields of flowers. The cynic in me, the guy who usually writes in italics, but whom I share a great affinity with, would usually consider all so very very trite. But I liked it, as it transformed a disaster movie, an End of the World scenario, into something allegorical. With death comes life. Like Melanie lighting up the tower of spore pods at the end of The Girl with all the Gifts, effectively freeing the "hungry virus" to all remaining humans, bitten or not, the world is no longer for us who have ruined it, but for those who come next.
Peripherally related, both that movie, more precisely its originating short story "Iphigenia in Aulis" and the game "The Last of Us" came out around 2012, two stories where the "zombie plague" is caused by cordyceps fungus, and both deal with the idea of sacrificing a child to save the world. I recently rewatched the TV series (maybe the rewatch will warrant a break from my 'not write about TV' hiatus, as I also didn't write about it originally in 2023) and was inspired to watch aforementioned movie.
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