D: Bruce McDonald. S: Tony Burgess. P: Jeffrey Coghlan, Ambrose Roche. Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Tony Burgess. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Kaleidoscope Entertainment.

What an agreeable surprise: a literate, ideas-driven horror drama with an engaging elderly hero, a compelling and original premise and strikingly economical delivery. It’s probably safe to say that Pontypool is the first semiotic zombie movie, more interested in quoting Roland Barthes than George A. Romero. Thankfully, living-dead clichés are supplanted by imaginative plotting, solid character work and rigorous narrative structure. It’s that rare thing: a true original.

Gravel-voiced Stephen McHattie – resembling a fearsomely-dishevelled Willem Dafoe outfitted by Kinky Friedman – plays down-at-heel talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy, a self-styled klaxon of truth whose take-no-prisoners attitude got him fired from his last job. Now Mazzy, his pride deflated, must grit his teeth and endure the daily grind of a small-town local radio station in Pontypool, just outside Ontario. It’s the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere, and Mazzy’s spirits have hit rock-bottom. Then, unexpectedly, a small glimmer of hope: confused reports of what seems to be a riot developing outside the home of the town’s controversial GP start filtering through to the station, and Mazzy seizes his chance to break out of the humdrum routine of travel bulletins, inane phone-ins and missing cats. But the news quickly turns sinister: the “rioters” are babbling some nonsensical mantra, attacking the townsfolk of Pontypool…and eating them. Somehow, a lethal virus has infected the very language we speak, transmitting itself to new hosts through simple words, spreading the contagion to anyone who hears and understands it. Soon Mazzy and his two station colleagues (Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly) find themselves barricaded inside their recording booth as infected “Conversationalists” invade the station, hungry for the sound of human voices – and for human flesh.

Pontypool unspools in real-time, like a Pinter play with added projectile grue. With the sole exception of a short opening sequence inside Mazzy’s car (surrounded by darkness and snow), and a scattering of monochrome character-portrait inserts, we never leave the confines of the radio station. McHattie is the grizzled focus of our attention, though there is fine support from his younger female co-stars (Houle and Reilly); characters are likeable, well-written, intelligent. Tony Burgess’s script – freely adapted from his 1995 novel “Pontypool Changes Everything”, essentially an interconnected series of character vignettes orbiting the central premise of a zombie Armageddon – is tightly-constructed, funny, and stays just the right side of pretension; it’s also a cracking thriller, building tension through an accumulation of confusing and often contradictory eyewitness testimony (all delivered via authentically fuzzy phonecalls). Occasionally McHattie’s dialogue trips over itself during his stream-of-consciousness monologues, but that’s a minor caveat.

The notion of a semiotic plague is so good, it’s almost a shame to find it shackled to the zombie genre; from time to time one wishes the nature of the threat matched the disease vector in terms of imaginative verve, but in truth the “Conversationalists” have very limited screen-time. The primary concern of the film is building tension, and this it does extremely well. Tiny seeds of disquiet grow from the simplest things: a child suddenly blurting out a stream of nonsense, a word helplessly repeated over and over again, jumbled speech patterns laced with deadly significance. Pontypool’s notion of a linguistic virus was also exploited, far less effectively, by Russell T. Davies in his “Midnight” script for Doctor Who; another study of confined menace, this time centering on an alien lifeform which uses language to generate fear and hate, this belongs more to the school of Star Trek’s “Day of the Dove” than Dawkins and Barthes. Where Davies used the conceit as a soapbox from which to rail against prejudice and bigotry, Burgess thankfully resists the urge to plaster an author’s message all over the piece; left in abstraction, the ideas take root all the more effectively.

Good as it is, Pontypool isn’t perfect. It’s hard to shake a feeling of disappointment that the filmmakers should have settled for zombies as their central threat, with such an outré conceptual basis. And the whole thing essentially runs out of steam by the final reel, concluding with a Hell in the Pacific-inspired non-ending and a post-credits coda which defies all description but evinces the influence of David Lynch’s particular brand of surrealist non sequitur. (A deleted segment earlier in the film – discussed in the commentary – likewise mined Lynch territory, specifically the conclusion of Mulholland Drive; its excision was probably a wise choice.) But none of these complaints should detract from the basic fact: Pontypool is perhaps the most inventive horror film of the last decade, and well worth the time of all intelligent genre fans.

Note: Two epic-scale sequels are planned, Pontypool Changes and Pontypool Changes Everything, which promise to eschew the stripped-down aesthetic that made the first chapter so diverting. At time of writing, however, they have yet to enter production; given the current log-jam of zombie Armageddons, perhaps this is no bad thing.