Final Cut

Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo star in this year’s Cannes Opening Night film: a gory, goofy remake of Shin’ichirō Ueda’s cult Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead.

In this affectionate and entertainingly gross French remake, a shambolic, low-budget zombie movie gets an unexpected jolt of afterlife when its obnoxious, abusive director (Duris, Mood Indigo, MIFF 2013; The Beat That My Heart Skipped) unlocks a real-life ancient curse. Pretty soon, the cast and crew – including the director’s wife, the martial-arts-trained head of make-up (Bejo, The Past, The Artist) – have bigger problems than their production falling apart: namely, waging bloody war against rampaging hordes of the undead.

Like his 2011 Oscar-winning love letter to early sound cinema, The Artist, director Michel Hazanavicius’s ode to the pleasures of horror filmmaking is both innovative, funny and full of giddy delight – and it doesn’t skimp on the over-the-top splatter. With a dash of everything from vintage George A. Romero to Shaun of the Dead, Train to Busan and The Dead Don’t Die, Final Cut is both a homage to the primal joys of zombie fare and a clever, deliriously funny addition to the genre.