Language is a Virus

I heard about Pontypool (2008) from the Projection Booth podcast, where they did over three hours on it. It looked intriguing, but not the kind of thing you’d see on Netflix. So when it showed up, I put it to the top of our queue.

It takes place in the small Canadian town of Pontypool. We see Stephen McHattie heading to work in an early morning blizzard. He is listening to himself on the radio, ruminating, in a Ken-Nordine FM-smooth style, on the name “Pontypool”. At a light, a woman runs up and pounds on his window, repeats something incomprehensible and disappears.

At the radio station, in the basement of an old civic building of some sort, he meets his young tech, Georgina Reilly, who gives him a bottle of whisky for his coffee. He goes on the air and continues ruminating, free associating, in his “take no prisoners” style. From his craggy face and cowboy hat, I think they might be suggesting Don Imus. When the station manager, Lisa Houle, gets in, she wants him to cut out the blather and do some school closings. That “take no prisoners” style is apparently what got him fired from the bigger station he was last at.

When they go to the traffic copter, they get some odd news: some kind of mob has formed outside a doctor’s office. As the traffic guy watches, the mob breaks through the wall of the office. His reporting gets more and more panicked, until they have to cut him off. They try to get some more info, but there is nothing on the wires, the police don’t know anything, and callers are sort of babbling and getting disconnected.

The traffic chopper guy calls back from a hiding place - turns out there is no chopper, he just parks on a hill to watch the traffic. Now he is being hunted by a violent, mindless mob, all repeating nonsense phrases. Before too long the mob has broken into the station and trapped them in the sound booth. And the cause of this epidemic of violence seems to be language itself. That’s very unlucky for a DJ.

This movie was clearly made on a tight budget, but makes a virtue of it. For a long time, I thought there would never be more than the three main characters, and that they’d never leave the station. Maybe it was all a hoax, even, or mass hysteria or a folie a trios. But it isn’t - it’s real and fatal. There’s some graphic gore as well as psychological tension. I’ll leave out the ending, which is a bit surreal, but there is a possible sequel.

Actually, two sequels. The movie is based on a book, Pontypool Changes Everything. Sequels Changes and Everything are either planned, or imagined by writer Tony Burgess and director Bruce McDonald.