Pontypool

A shock jock exiled to a small Ontario town takes the morning shift. Reports come in of a crowd outside a doctor's surgery. The station never leaves the basement of a church.

Bruce McDonald adapts Tony Burgess's novel and keeps almost all of it as radio: what the audience knows arrives by phone call, by a reporter in a helicopter that does not exist, and by a stringer describing something he should not still be describing.

Stephen McHattie is superb and the film is essentially a vehicle for his voice.

The idea, that certain English words become infectious and that understanding them is the vector, is the best original premise in modern zombie fiction, and the escape from it, deliberately breaking your own comprehension, is inspired.

It runs 93 minutes on essentially one set and never feels stagey.