The Fantasia Film Festival this year has given their Canadian Trailblazer award to Bruce McDonald, one of my favorite Canadian directors, Now, this is a man who makes bold films that always aim high and treat their audiences like they’re more than just sentient meat sacks that buy movie tickets. He has grand, daring visions and all of his films feel like sitting down at a long table to eat a vast feast of ideas. Always delicious, but certainly not for weak stomachs or delicate dispositions.
Pontypool stars Stephen McHattie as former shock jock Grant Mazzy working at a small town radio station after some sort of incident that got him fired from a much bigger show. He now does the early morning shift in the titular Ontario town of Pontypool. As he’s going to work one very cold and dark snowy morning, a woman bangs on his car window muttering to herself. Before he can do more than just gawk at her, she then runs back into the dark. Grant is rattled from the encounter but continues onto work at the station, an old repurposed church basement, where his assistant Laurel-Ann and station manager Sydney are waiting. He begins the show. Normal radio stuff: weather, school closures, obituaries, and a missing cat call Honey, while reporter Ken Loney “The Sunshine Chopper” checks in with traffic and weather.
Stephen McHattie has the deepest, lushest, most sonorous voice since Joe Silver, and the film lives and dies by how hypnotic his voice can be. In fact, the whole movie is about the hypnotic power of words, which got me thinking: Ever hear a new word for the first time and then find yourself saying that word again and again throughout the day, just because it fits perfectly into whatever you were talking about, even though you had never that word before ever in your life? As if that word had been waiting your whole life to appear to you at the exact time you’d need it. Doesn’t that feel strangely eerie? Like it’s a coincidence that isn’t a coincidence? Words, after all, are not wholly natural things. Did you know that human beings have been around for 300,000 years, but lived pretty much unchanged up until 70,000 years ago? Until then, we were sort of just cavemen. Then, around 70,000 years ago, there’s a great leap forward in behavior. Stories begin to be told. Tools begin to be standardized. Burials become rituals. We begin to decorate cave walls and ourselves. We probably begin to pray. In a very short time, we begin the very slow climb to modernity. Academics think it has to do with language. That the reason all of this happened so quickly is that we learned to speak in sentences, which helped us express ourselves more clearly to others and thus pass on knowledge to our children in a much more efficient way. You can physically show someone how to hunt of course, they can mimic you and practice the skill, but it takes complex words to share the little details learned from a lifetime of experience. Which begs the question: Why did we start speaking at all? Did someone train us? Did someone force us?
Anyway, this is all speculation, I’m just thinking out loud. Most of what I said is probably inaccurate nonsense. Let’s get back to the movie!
I won’t call Pontypool perfect, but it’s as perfect of a slow burn horror movie as can be. Not just that, but it also has a few ideas rattling around in it’s head beyond trying to only scare you, and that’s always appreciated. Even the quiet moment early in the film feel as if there is something momentously terrible happening, a twisting and growing dread out there in the snow. Like the pro he is, McDonald is setting up his pieces just right. Building tension, creating atmosphere, carving the mood out of thin air.
Not too long after Grant’s morning show starts, we begin to slowly piece together that something is very wrong. Frantic reports of riots and violence in the small town of Pontypool come in, followed by reports of the military arriving to control the situation. Something is happening. Something bad. Something big. People seem to be infected with a sort of earworm. They can’t stop repeating specific words, and it’s driving them crazy.
What helps really sell these scenes is how professional Grant and Sydney and Laurel-Ann are. They don’t panic. They don’t stop the show. They do their jobs. They stay at their posts, remain calm, and keep the public informed despite the fact that all these events are occurring just a few miles away and getting closer. The film never shows us what is happening, but we don’t need to see it because Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, and Georgina Reilly “show” it to us with their reactions to the increasingly disturbing reports and panicked callers.
I also love how Stephen McHattie portrays Grant Mazzy. He plays him as cynical and sarcastic and kind of jerk, but also as someone that is very human underneath. You get the feeling that Grant is abrasive and dismissive with most people but incredibly warm and giving with the people he cares about. From my own experience with real people like Grant, I find this detail quite accurate.
The whole movie is basically a stage play. We don’t really leave the radio station location and we don’t really see anything of what’s happening outside. Yet, McDonald always keeps it visually interesting and never lets the pacing lag. The film doesn’t have any slow spots at all. I was never bored. As far as “zombie” movies go, this is one of my top ones.
So, congratulations to Bruce McDonald for his Canadian Trailblazer award. It was well deserved. He’s never been as well known as David Cronenberg or Denis Villeneuve, but he should be. Hopefully, I’ve introduced a few people to his work, and hopefully you’ll watch more of his stuff. It’s worth a look, trust me.
When McDonals was given the award, Fantasia also had a screening of his 2008 movie Pontypool, which is probably the best introduction to his body of work. Either that or Hard Core Logo, a 1996 punk rock mockumentary that is quite excellent. I personally favor Pontypool by a hair’s width because it’s a genre film and while I love punk rock, I love horror movies just a tiny little bit more. They’re both fun and interesting movies, but each is fun or interesting in a different way.
My advice? Even though I’m reviewing one and not the other, watch them both.
As we constantly review new films, classics, and re-releases, this list is only complete as of right this moment (at time of posting) and will likely become incomplete at some point.
Fantasia 2026 runs from July 16th to August 2nd, 2026