Final Rating: 4.5/5
Early on in Bruce McDonald’s 2008 film Pontypool, playing at Fantasia Festival, our protagonist Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), asks the philosophical question “when should you call 911”? It doesn’t seem like one, if you or someone around you need immediate help, you call for it. But when one service connects you with an ambulance, firetruck or police car, there are plenty of different reasons to call the number. What happens when a situation arises where you are unsure of whether it is necessary to request assistance. Is the incident not as serious? Do you know if you might be making a situation worse by getting authorities or medical professionals involved? What if you don’t need to, but later decide you need to call? The more you analyze certain incidents the more you question what you need to do.
Mazzy, a radio DJ working out of small town Ponypool, Ontario, a rural community halfway between Oshawa and Peterborough, two already small cities. He exists in a world where he is a cross between a shock jock with their juvenile humour and cruel games they enjoy to play on others and conservative talk radio host where every white man has an axe to grind with someone. He’s full of piss and vinegar and if it wasn’t for the silkiest, yet gravelly voice and the ability to turn on the charm, he probably wouldn’t have a job.
He comes into work for his morning shift with something stuck in his craw. It’s a blizzard outside and the top stories that his producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), wants him to cover are school closures and unsafe road conditions. They have an adversarial relationship, similar to divorced couples who still care for each other immensely, but know they aren’t compatible as a unit.
The two of them, alongside board operator Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly) start their shift as normal, with Mazzy starting to drink far earlier than is normal. But when their eye in the sky traffic guy, Ken Loney (Rick Roberts), calls in claiming to see a riot of people attacking and killing others things get deadly serious for the trio.
The film uses the zombie genre in inventive ways. Everything that happens in the film occurs at the radio station. It is a one location movie. When Ken continues to explain the developing situation in an increasing bleaker tone, callers also call in exhibiting strange behaviour that end up later being revealed as symptoms. Everything is auditory. The film almost fully reverses the maxim of show don’t tell, instead relying on telling and not showing.
Inspired by the radio adaptation of War of the Worlds that Orson Welles produced and scared America into thinking they were really being invaded by aliens back in 1938, McDonald follows a similar style of storytelling, albeit just from a different angle. The calls, the radio dispatches, the 911 call tracker, the broadcast interruption that plays a message only in French, the really weird way people in general are acting all builds a tower of tension and dread.
Without showing us the developing breakout of the some sort of mass casualty event, McDonald forces viewers to imagine the worst. We see Sydney and Laurel try to hide the truth from Mazzy before he can report things that seem too fake to be real. The hardened Grant Mazzy, who looks like he is scared of nothing, becomes utterly terrified of the world crashing into him.
When we finally get to see what this impending apocalypse looks like, it is still in small moments. Someone inside the building gets infected and the slow descent into mindlessness is a fantastic physical acting performance that could easily go under appreciated. When the gore creeps in, it’s stomach churning in a simple yet effective way. A moment where someone vomits their guts all over the DJ booth glass windows once again uses a trick to make it feel far worse than what they are performing.
McHattie, a veteran tough guy actor, best known as one of “hey it’s that guy”, gets the chance to lead a film that almost completely relies on him being the focal point. He’s a layered asshole, which makes him infinitely interesting because you never know how he will react. People likely describe his voice as one fit for radio, but his natural smoothness elevates past any notable disc jockey in real life. It doesn’t seem real that someone could sound so good.
In what is essentially a three-hander for most of the run time, McHattie, Houle and Reilly play very well together. They have a fascinating synergy where all of them have different dynamics with the other. On such a dialogue heavy film, the screenplay by Tony Burgess (who wrote the source novel, Pontypool Changes Everything), moves at a snappy pace, quickly raising the stakes and the heightening of emotions in this enclosed space.
Even looking through the film in a modern lens, it offers new perspectives. At one point, a complete quarantine is called and no one is allowed to leave where they are. When the world shut down due to COVID-19 back in 2020, it felt like the world was ending and there was no way to tell if someone you encounter outside your bubble could infect and kill you. While McDonald couldn’t have predicted a global pandemic, it’s easy to look at what happened in real life and see the analogous nature of the film.
There even is a nice turn of storytelling expectations. We learn early on that Laurel-Ann was a veteran who was stationed in Afghanistan and is considered a hero. As a viewer you have a certain expectation of what this means, but McDonald and Burgess make it into a red herring of sorts. It’s an effective form of subversion.
The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz just recently named Pontypool the 83rd best Canadian film ever (a list that also includes Mcdonald’s Hard Core Logo which comes in at number 26), it’s enduring legacy as a new spin of the zombie genre, while not skimping on any of the scares make this a must watch for any horror fans and a must rewatch for everyone who has already seen it.
Pontypool was seen during the 2026 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
