‘Zombi Child': Director Bertrand Bonello Tackles Voodoo and Coming-of-Age [Review]

Last summer at Cannes, it seemed like we just couldn’t get away from all the zombies and genre cinema splattered on-screen. From Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan “The Dead Don’t Die,” to Mati Diop’s artful “Atlantics,” you couldn’t escape the living dead on the croisette. Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, which played in the director’s fortnight sidebar, is a zombie movie, but one filled with dangerously spiritual voodoo. Bonello’s ambitious, but complicated film is split into two back-and-forth settings: 1960s Haiti, where a man (Mackenson Bijou) dies and is resurrected into hardcore slavery on a sugar plantation; and present day Paris, as Haitian teenager, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), a new student at an all-girls private school, is quickly taken in by a secretive sorority of white girls.

Bonello’s mixing of genres, coming-of-age, romance, supernatural and horror, makes it difficult for the viewer to truly be sucked into Bonello’s phantasmagoric world. The director’s last film, the excellent “Nocturama,” worked at a higher level because it delved into a fully lived-in but simple and accessible setting, a shopping mall.

Bonello’s message in “Zombi Child” seems to be about cultural appropriation, one mixed in with Mélissa’s white, lovesick classmate (Louise Labeque). The first-world views that arise from the white-collar students in the film seem like a distant, but honest reflection of the current French zeitgeist, one in which the Haitian population is ever-so-growing but lacks the desire of conforming to the French white way of thinking. The dramatic and cultural conflicts, however, are only teased upon by Bonello here. We get it, there are unconscious biases with us white folks but it ends with a climax that’s more exposition than satisfying resolution.  

The entire film feels coalesced in a way that feels both messy and uninvolving. It feel like a rather strange brew of things, but it never resorts to finding its own identity within that convoluted mix. [C-]