Review: Blood Quantum (2019)

Blood Quantum (2019)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

The Canadian zombie film Blood Quantum is at once a bold piece of representation, a film made by indigenous people with a mostly First Nations cast and crew, and also one of the most kick-ass zombie movies of the last ten years. Its plot and early '80s reservation setting are inspired by a real confrontation between the government of Quebec and the Listuguj Mi'gmaq First Nation in 1981 over salmon fishing rights, depicted in the documentary Incident at Restigouche that writer/director Jeff Barnaby had the entire cast watch before production began. The setting and characters it established in the first act felt authentic, like a real working-class town filled with people going about their lives, so when the dead started rising with a hunger for human flesh, I wanted to see these people succeed. And then came a long parade of zombie-slaying badassery that got more than a few cries of "hell yeah!" out of me, paired with a fairly unique concept that the film used to both dive deeper into its central metaphors and themes and justify some awesome moments. It's a hell of a movie that leaves you with a lot to think about once you're done watching its vicious game of Zombies and Indians, and I fully expect it to go down as a zombie classic.

Set in 1981 on the Red Crow Indian Reservation (a very thinly fictionalized version of the aforementioned Listuguj Mi'gmaq First Nation), we start with the Mi'kmaq inhabitants of the rez discovering some weird stuff happening around them. The old fisherman Gisigu watches his salmon continue to flop about even after he's gutted them. His son, the local sheriff Traylor, has to put down his ex-wife Joss' dying dog only for it to get back up and try to attack him. Traylor's son Joseph has been arrested in the white town of Hollarbaster across the river with his half-brother Alan, aka Lysol, for vandalism, and while in lockup, Joseph and Lysol witness their cellmate start vomiting blood before attacking them. When Joseph is taken to the hospital, he, his pregnant white girlfriend Charlie, and Joss, who works as a nurse there, all witness the dead coming back to life and attacking the living. Yep, zombies in rural Canada. There's a twist, though: the indigenous are immune to the zombie plague, and so six months later, Red Crow is the last bastion of civilization for miles around, the Mi'kmaq in charge while white people seeking shelter are herded into a refugee camp. However, just because they can't become zombies doesn't mean the Mi'kmaq can't still get killed, and so the presence of the refugees, who could unleash a horde of zombies on the rez if infection were to breach its walls, has driven a deep rift into the tribe, with Lysol leading a faction wishing to get rid of them altogether.

As somebody whose current job has him working with a lot of Native American (mostly Navajo) co-workers, I recognized much of this film's depiction of modern-day indigenous people and life in its cast of characters. Barnaby, himself of Mi'kmaq descent, draws them like real people who, before the zombie apocalypse, were mostly dealing with everyday working-class concerns, some of them more or less virtuous and others turning out to be gigantic assholes who ruin things for everyone. Some bits of dialogue are in Mi'kmaq to indicate that certain characters are bilingual, in much the same way that a film set in Washington Heights or East LA might have characters throw in some Spanish, but it's never a distraction. These folks all felt like the kinds of people you might encounter in any poorer area, and not just on a reservation; knowing quite a few white people from similarly blue-collar backgrounds, the main characters' struggles before the zombies showed up felt eerily similar to things I saw with them, too. The whole cast did great work bringing them to life, too, with the biggest props going to Michael Greyeyes as the heroic sheriff Traylor and Kiowa Gordon for making Lysol a truly loathsome sack of shit villain.

That said, the fact that most of the main characters are indigenous is not incidental to the plot. Their heritage turns out to be what protects them from infection by the zombie plague, and in the second act the Red Crow reservation becomes the center of humanity as far as we know. The Mi'kmaq, gifted with a major advantage in fighting zombies, have become the dominant power, with the white people under their protection at their mercy in a "reservation" of their own living in squalid conditions. While it's never stated where the zombies came from, it is implied in the film that it may be divine retribution by Mother Earth against the greedy, ravenous white settlers who destroyed the land, hence the immunity of the natives -- the Ghost Dance by way of George A. Romero. And the main characters are fully aware of the irony of how their fortunes have reversed. Lysol, in particular, comes to believe in the superiority of his tribe over the white man, growing to hate his half-brother Joseph for having a child with a white woman and the leaders of the tribe for allowing the refugees to stay. Without spoiling anything, this sort of ethnic supremacy is torn down viciously, with Lysol going from a mere common punk at the start of the film to a truly loathsome villain whose hatred blinds him to how his plan could backfire. If Gaia did indeed intend to spare the natives from her zombies, then she must have made a mistake with Lysol and his followers. The film ultimately ends on a message that, should oppressed peoples ever gain the upper hand over those who put them down, they probably shouldn't treat them the same way they were treated lest a cycle of violence and hate destroy them both.

Don't think that this movie is all just ponderous discussions of historic injustice with a thin layer of zombie viscera draped over it, though. Director Barnaby never forgets that he's making a zombie movie above all else. And on that front, he mixes a grounded, blue-collar small town setting, a colder and rainier version of The Walking Dead's Georgia, with the kinds of larger-than-life, crazy-awesome violence and action that make you really remember a zombie movie, with the characters putting guns, chainsaws, machetes, a woodchipper, and more to great use for killing the undead. Why does Gisigu have a katana? Don't know, don't care, it was fuckin' awesome watching an old fisherman slice up a horde of zombies in a heroic last stand. Even though the main characters can't get infected, they can still get their throats and guts torn out by the teeth and claws of the undead, so it still felt as though anybody could die, to say nothing of how this film follows in the grand zombie movie tradition of having other humans be the most dangerous creatures out there. The gore flows like a river as both the main characters kick zombie ass and the zombies bite off things that you really don't want to lose. And these are fast zombies, too, so the scares are gnarly, in-your-face, and violent. This ain't a subtle movie that waits with low-key tension-building to prime a few big scares, this is more like Resident Evil 4 than that.

The Bottom Line

Not only is it a lot smarter than your average zombie flick, it's just as awesome to watch on top of it. It's available on Shudder and home video, so either way, I highly recommend it for fans of either zombie movies or indigenous cinema.