Pontypool is mostly a thinking man’s zombie apocalypse movie (in an interview, director Bruce McDonald carefully tiptoed around the word ‘zombie,’ but we’re all adults here). Even the silly-sounding title is not only the name of the real village in Ontario where the film is set, but it serves to establish from the beginning the movie’s fascination with language.
The plot is an allegory about the power of words to destroy and to heal. With the help of a local doctor, disc jockey Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), and “technical cowgirl” Georgina Reilly (Laurel-Ann Drummond) — who appear to be the only employees at the radio station where they work, but then it’s an early morning show —, theorize that the unseen, town-wide riot-turned-butchery raging outside may be caused by what the good doctor calls a “God bug”:
It’s viral … But not of the blood … not in the air. Not on, or even in, our bodies … It is in words. Not all words. Not all speaking. But in some. Some words are infected. And it spreads out when the contaminated word is spoken.
Without being too obvious (“kill,” for instance, is an infected word, but there’s no specific mention of self-evident politically incorrect language, such as ethnic and sexual slurs), McDonald and scriptwriter Tony Burgess fully erase the already thin line between hate speech and hate crimes.
Or, rather, they would, if only they were consistent. As it turns out, people are advised against using “baby talk” and “terms of endearment,” since they are especially infectious — but why? I’m not a fan of either of those types of speech, but wouldn’t it make more sense for harsh language to be more virulent? And I don’t mean ‘harsh language’ in an MPAA, ‘will somebody please think of the the children’ sort of way; I’m talking more about truly nasty, vitriolic, ill-intentioned word choice. People calling each other things like ‘shmoopy’ are indeed infuriating, but excluding Blue Velvet, you don’t usually equate baby talk with heinous acts of violence.
There are two reason that the filmmakers bring up the whole “terms of endearment thing;” 1) the events of the movie take place during Valentine’s Day, and 2) a local woman has lost a cat called Honey, and there are Honey the Cat ‘missing’ posters everywhere. This is supposed to account for a higher rate of contagion, but it feels contrived nonetheless. If McDonald and Burgess felt they just had to go that route, I don’t think there realistically is that big a difference between February the 14th and any other day; on the other hand, by committing to a conceit that isn’t as effective in practice as it must have seemed on paper, they deprived their film from much of the impact that it could have had if they’d stuck to a ‘words as weapons’ approach.
It’s a credit to the filmmakers’ skill and/or luck that this situation is not a total loss, as it illustrates how communication can easily and unwittingly go wrong. Grant & Co. receive a warning message in French (this being Canada and English being the disease vector) concerning which words to refrain from using, and decide to translate it and broadcast it in English — but they must have used Google Translate or a similar automatic translation service, because Grant unknowingly reads the communiqué all the way through, including the part at the end that says, “For greater safety, please avoid the English language. Please, do not translate this message” (d’oh!). The way that Grant and Sydney attempt to come up with what you might call, if you’re feeling punny, an oral vaccine, is also pretty clever, resulting in a series of stream-of-consciousness, linguistically deconstructive synesthetic metaphors (“‘The Sky is a Person. Laughter is Walking. Yellow is Crowded,” etc.).
Minor flaws aside, Pontypool has a lot going for it. As a radio-centric drama slash horror flick, it is closer to Talk Radio and The Vast of Night than to Nightmare Radio: The Night Stalker or On the Line. Moreover, with its single location, minimalist cast, and ‘a word is worth a thousand pictures’ dialogue, Pontypool resembles an exceptionally well-told campfire tale. All things considered, the rare, cerebral zombie movie that knows a brain is good for more than just dinner.