By Laurence Lerman / New York City
The zombie comedy Final Cut, French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius’s latest film, opens in limited theatrical release around the country on Friday (Jun 14), with a streaming platform premiere slated for September 23.
A zom-com? From the guy who made 2011’s The Artist, the wonderful romantic comedy-drama that was nominated for five Academy Awards and brought home the statuettes for Best Picture and Best Director for Hazanavicius?
He made a zombie comedy?
Yes, he did! The veteran director applied his talents to a genre that’s usually associated with younger, more indie-spirited filmmakers early on in their careers, and cranked out a zombie flick.
I’m psyched to report that it’s good! And as Hazanavicius is indeed a tasteful French writer/director of a certain reputation, you can be assured that his effort comes from a solid pedigree.
Described by Variety in May 2022 as “arguably the goriest film to ever open the Cannes Film Festival,” Hazanavicius’s Final Cut is a French language remake of Japanese filmmaker Shinichiro Ueda’s 2017 cult smash One Cut to the Dead (which is itself based on Ryoichi Wada’s 2011 play Ghost in the Box!).
The Ueda film pulled in a staggering $60 million worldwide on a $25,000 budget and while the Oscar-winning Hazanavicius’ fresh take on the tale probably won’t come even close to that haul, it’s sure to make some ripples on the specialty circuit and streaming platforms.
In a story that’s virtually identical to its predecessor’s—save for its language and cast being French and not Japanese (even the wardrobes are the same!)—Final Cut begins with a 30-minute, one-shot sequence wherein a zombie B-movie production shoot turns ferociously real, with cast and crew members transforming into the cannibalistic undead.
After that opening 30-minute movie-within-a-movie ends and its credits roll, Final Cut jumps back to a month earlier to reveal just exactly how the deal to make the zombie film came to be. We see how so-so French filmmaker Rémi Bouillon (Romain Duris) is approached by a Japanese producer (Yoshiko Takehara) to helm a one-take horror flick that is scheduled to be broadcast live on the launch day of a new all-zombie streaming platform (which doesn’t really seem that unrealistic these days). Hungry for work, Rémi accepts the gig.
A slew of pre-production accidents (led by a car accident that incapacitates the film’s two stars) leave Remi and his actress wife (Bérénice Bejo, Hazanavicius’s real-life wife) playing the leading roles in Remi’s movie, and their aspiring filmmaker daughter (Simone Hazanavicius, the filmmaker’s real-life teenage daughter) taking over the increasingly guerilla production.
The final third of Final Cut then shows us how the film we saw in the first act was actually shot, revealing to us how the zombie sausage was made, as it were, and explaining some of the bizarre behavior and schlockiness we witnessed earlier on in the 30-minute film.
So Final Cut is essentially a meta-zombie movie, where the gruesome effects and blood-splattering action aren’t as important or rewarding as the movie’s examination of the filmmaking that went on behind them. It also cleverly divulges how and why the effects that we watched came to be included in the frequently off-the-cuff film we saw at the outset.
Over the years, Hazanavicius has crafted a number of movies on moviemaking, beginning with a pair of James Bond-ish undercover agent spoofs, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009), through The Artist and, most recently, his affectionate French New Wave homage Godard Mon Amour (2017). He’s clearly back for more fun with this bloody-enough and very capable zombie comedy that lances the contemporary film and TV industry nearly as much as it does the seemingly unending horde of zombie projects invading our theaters and homes (as AMC’s half-dozen Walking Dead spin-offs and accompanying universe of webisodes and videogames can attest to).
In a 2022 interview with UK film site The Upcoming (https://www.theupcoming.co.uk/), Hazanavicius admitted that he is not really a fan of the zombie genre, though he did check out a few at one stage because he thought they were “funny.”
“Aside from that, I did watch quite a lot of zombie films and series for Final Cut and rewatched all of [Night of the Living Dead director] George Romero’s movies,” said Hazanavicius. “Perhaps Final Cut’s main set recalls the shopping mall in [Romero’s] Dawn of the Dead (1978). My film isn’t really a zombie movie at all—it’s no Train to Busan.”
Hazanavicius is also quick to declare that that, splatter quotient notwithstanding, his movie is out to garner laughs.
“Final Cut, first and foremost, is a comedy. Perhaps of a special sort, but it really is a big, fat comedy,” he said. “My aim is that the film is smart enough on one hand to allow itself to be totally idiotic on the other.”
So, the first 30 minutes are purely a zombie movie and the remaining hour is a deconstruction of the creation of said low-budget movie by a team of frantic and creative filmmakers. If nothing else, Final Cut, like One Cut to the Dead before it, succeeds as a tribute to the idea of DIY films, those no-budget movies that are made with more energy than money and are fueled by a filmmaker’s depth of feeling for what he or she has crafted. The results often make more of an impression on an audience than budget or box-office numbers.
Still, with its cast of well-known French actors, a reported $4.4 million budget and a respected director/director at its helm, Final Cut is far from a DIY film itself, unlike its micro-budgeted predecessor. It is indeed a moneyed remake, something that the film industry has done well by when it comes to taking lower-budget horror cult films from an earlier era and injecting them with some cash and prestige for a remake.
That’s been the case with such classics as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and The Evil Dead and it’s a strategy that, like the zombies at their center, doesn’t die all that easily.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.