The hilarious and oddly touching Canadian social-satire/zombie-comedy Fido opens with its own backstory -- in the form of a '50s-style cinema newsreel, shown to a class of wide-eyed schoolkids.
It's a fitting way to open a movie about fear-based conformity, recalling as it does the era of Cold War "moral hygiene" films that purported to tell kids how to act, and which impulses to suppress in order to become good citizens.
Fido's "good news" newsreel cheerily recaps an invasion of animated corpses (a plot line now second nature to anyone who's ever seen a movie with the words "Living Dead" in the title), and lauds the military corporation -- ZomCon -- that both keeps the zombies at bay and enslaves some of them, via technology.
It's the '50s with zombies standing in for the Red Menace -- assuming you could have also purchased a Communist to perform menial chores.
What people do with their pet zombies ranges from the functional (housework, gardening, etc.) to the creepy: A lascivious pipe-smoking neighbour (played by O Brother Where Art Thou's Tim Blake Nelson) has a teenaged girl zombie for purposes more suited to an inflatable doll.
Amid all this, we meet the Robinsons, Bill (Dylan Baker), Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss) and little Timmy (K'Sun Ray), whose fearful and repressed patriarch has refused to let the family get a zombie, owing to the trauma of having had to kill his own zombie dad.
All that changes when the Robinsons get a new neighbour, a macho ZomCon exec named Jonathan Bottoms (Henry Czerny), who subtly implies to Bill that people who don't own zombies aren't good citizens.
Enter Fido (Billy Connolly), a zombie with an apparent inner-life, judging by the brightness in his eyes. The brash Scot comic Connolly really does deserve some kind of acting award for the amazing job he does in this mute role.
Of course, the "obedience collar" that renders zombies docile is bound to go on the fritz, and Fido will kill -- leaving Timmy with the choice of turning his beloved pet in, or being his enabler.
Ray's resemblance to the Timmy from Lassie is no casting accident. There's even a "What's that Fido? Timmy's in trouble?" line that gets one of the biggest laughs in the movie.
The violence in Fido, bloody as it is, is stylized and even, at times, in silhouette (particularly when Timmy gets in the act, rekilling Fido's victims who turn zombie).
But it's the weirdness inside the Robinson house that is the most affecting.
Bill's character arc is predicated by the realization that an animated corpse is less repressed with his emotions than he is, and that his own wife is starting to respond to Fido's innate appreciation of her feelings. Fido becomes the lightning rod, first for his resentment and then for his redemption.
Amid the candy-coloured, fantasy-'50s cinematography, it's all presented as a kind of arch cartoon, with the sort of line delivery you might encounter in a David Lynch or Tim Burton movie (two obvious influences on B.C. director Andrew Currie, Wes Anderson being another).
What seems at first to be a one-note joke in Fido quickly develops layers of meaning.
Fido, which has played to acclaim at both the Toronto and Sundance film fests, has a good chance to be the "sleeper" Canadian film of the year.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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