MadS

With the Days and Weeks series failing to progress to 28 Mois Plus Tard, despite an epilogue from the latter that saw Britain's infected traversing the Champ de Mars in Paris, it falls to David Moreau's MadS (or was it Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher's The Horde?) to describe how France might deal with catching ferocity. Told as if filming was accomplished in one continuous take, MadS tracks the worsening fortunes of a group of teenagers attempting to celebrate a birthday. First up is Milton Riche's Romain, a rich kid who dabbles in blood-red cocaine and drives around in his absent father's sports car. Idling back from a hurriedly concluded connect, Romain comes across a bandaged, bleeding woman who offers up a brutal-looking recording device by way of explanation before emptying the car's glove compartment for something to stab her unfeeling body with. 

An increasingly distressed Romain makes it to the house party thrown in his honour, inadvertently transmitting his full-body freak-out to his friends and lovers. Romain may be difficult to care too much about but MadS has a secret weapon in the form of Laurie Pavy's Ana, his jilted girlfriend. Initially dressed in a billowing shirt, presumably Romain's, and positioned as something of a nag in her boyfriend's self-indulgent life, Ana's fortunes change when she takes a crimson bump and discovers that Romain has gotten her friend, Lucille Guillaume's Julia, pregnant. Chased from her taxi by the trigger-happy liquidators policing the spread of this contagion, Ana begins to change both physically and psychologically. She sheds her voluminous outer layer, tearing it from her person, to examine her chewed-up torso. Ana runs her fingers over seeping bullet holes that, quite obviously, have not proven to be lethal. Suddenly armed with an invincible body, Ana does what anyone experiencing the twitching malevolence of a cellar ghoul from The Evil Dead would do: she steals a pedal bike then races after her love rival so she can, as she puts it, eat her face.