Final Cut - 2023 Alliance Française French Film Festival

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Date Reviewed: 07/03/2023

Final Cut

French Film Festival

"That’s not it at all! It’s the final scene, I want to see real terror in your eyes. I can tell you’re acting, but to make matters worse, I can tell you’re acting badly", the director screams at his lead actress before slapping his lead actor hard in the face for trying to calm things down. The tone is set for Final Cut.

This production is an almost shot-for-shot remake of Shin’ichirō Ueda’s 2017 comedy sensation One Cut of the Dead, an ode to the insanity of making a movie — in this case, a B grade horror movie about people who get attacked by zombies while making a B grade horror movie about people who get attacked by zombies.

Strangely director Michel Hazanavicius stages his action in an open, spacious building that has all the personality of a barren desert.

It doesn’t give the film away to reveal that the first section of “Final Cut” is meant to feel unsettling, but it quickly gets bogged down.

In the first part of the picture, all filmed in one continuous 30-minute take, we witness a crazed director (Romain Duris) demanding that his actors bring more intensity to the zombie thriller he’s shooting. To increase the realism, he evokes an ancient curse that unleashes real zombies, so his cast and crew now fighting desperately for their lives. But what the audience is watching is confusing: why does the director occasionally talk to an unseen cameraman who is recording all of this? And why do the director and his white actors all have Japanese names?

Soon, the confusion is revealed: the 30-minute sequence is actually a film that struggling film director Remi (Duris) has created, with Final Cut then flashbacking weeks earlier as he prepares to make this ambitious single-shot zombie thriller for Japanese investors.

Final Cut’s third and final segment then follows Remi and his team as they shoot that 30-minute sequence, the director determined to keep the project afloat while tackling one obstacle after another as the camera continues to roll.

Hardly deep but compulsive viewing, Final Cut makes both zombie apocalypses and film sets look chaotic — and also very funny.

Reviewed by Barry Hill OAM