The Horde (2010)

The Horde arrives from France with the weary assurance of a genre picture that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing. A squad of corrupt policemen storms a condemned tower block in a derelict Paris suburb to avenge a fallen colleague, only to find the criminal gang upstairs and a plague of the undead downstairs. Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher keep the camera close, the corridors dark, and the dialogue functional. The result is lean, nasty, and admirably free of sermonizing.

The film's social texture is genuine but incidental. The banlieue setting, the social housing, the mutual contempt between police and the immigrant gang that controls the building, all of this is drawn from the real anxieties of the French periphery. The cast reflects those demographics without ceremony. Eriq Ebouaney and Doudou Masta occupy their roles as men, not as statements. Claude Perron's Aurore holds her own among the survivors, though the screenplay grants her competence and nothing resembling an argument. There is class resentment here, a whiff of grievance about who gets abandoned in the towers, but it never hardens into a thesis.

What we have, then, is a survival machine. Zombies are egalitarian. They eat the crooked cop and the drug dealer with the same enthusiasm, and the film seems content to let that be the whole of its politics. No character pauses to explain the meaning of the moment. No lesson is delivered. For a viewer accustomed to the modern habit of turning every apocalypse into a seminar, the restraint is almost startling. The Horde wants only to frighten you for ninety minutes and then release you. It succeeds often enough to justify the effort, and it never once mistakes itself for a moral instruction.