Review: Zero – “it is undeniably stylish and cool.”

Directed by Jean Luc Herbulot
Starring Hus Miller, Cam McHarg, William Defoe

Back in 2022, at a late-night screening in the Cameo Cinema during the Edinburgh International Film Festival (by the way, keep watching here for this year’s EIFF reports coming next month!), one of the festival’s programmer’s gave a glowing introduction to a film called Saloum, describing it as part of a new-wave of self-confident movie making coming out of Africa. They were not wrong, Saloum was one of my favourites from that year’s EIFF selection, a film I’d picked more on a vibe than on knowing much about it beforehand (see here for my review on LFF).

So when I was offered a chance to review Zero, another Senegal-set movie from the same director, Jean Luc Herbulot, I was intrigued to see what he had done now, and while there were some stumbling points (especially when socio-political subtexts become too foregrounded), for the most part this was a high-energy, thrilling ride, and again, as with Saloum, it was very cool to see work like this coming out of the African film scene.

The main plot device is wonderfully simple and has echoes of Western action-thrillers like Speed or Phone Booth: an American businessman, Hus Miller, wakes up on a local bus in Dakar. He’s discombobulated, to say the least. The last thing he remembers is getting off the plane, thinking of his posh hotel, now he’s in some poor neighbourhood in a bus, missing all his belongings, and with no idea how the hell he got here, and as he panics, the locals around him go from puzzled to antagonistic to his panicked shouting. But worse is to come…

A young woman hands him a phone and earpiece, telling him she was paid by a mysterious Someone to give them to him, then leaves. As he stands up, he finds he has a cardboard sign around his chest, with the name of his bus stop on it, but when he takes it off, the rest of the passengers scream and run off the bus, quite sensibly, given the removal of the crude sign reveals that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, with a ten hour countdown on it…

Moments before a radio news piece on the bus had reported, in French, that a person had blown up a part of the city, and police are hunting suspected terrorists, so right away, in the opening moments, we get a hint that this isn’t just happening to one person. He’s all for giving himself over to the police, but when his phone rings, he finds the person orchestrating all of this (the purring voice of William Defoe, channelling just a little bit of Charles Townsend’s reasonable tones from Charlie’s Angels) warning him if he does that, he will certainly die, his only option is to follow his instructions, which soon lead to more short missions which he has little choice but to attempt.

It isn’t long before he is brought together with a second American in the same predicament (Cam McHarg’s hulking, larger, man of violent action). Neither is named, Miller is simply One, McHarg is Two. They are now forced into more missions for this phone voice, who is tracking them by GPS and watching them with a drone – any attempt to deviate will lead to a big bada-boom, completion of increasingly difficult tasks should lead to freedom and continuing to exist in a non-exploded form.

I won’t go much further into the set-up here, as much of the joy here is seeing what hoops the unlikely pair will be forced to jump through (very unwillingly), and it cracks along at a fair old pace, with Herbulot showing he still has a flair for style as well as action and tension. There’s a bit of sag in the middle (to be fair it’s hard to keep that pace up for the entire length of the film), and as it goes along we find that there is indeed a lot more going on than just these two being used as unwilling pawns, with a larger scheme going on involving other strands that are all part of the phone man’s masterplan, which I won’t spoil, but it does involve the way locals live in relation to uncaring Western powers.

No, it’s not perfect, and some of the final reel perhaps explains more than it should – some of this worked better when it was subtext and hinted at rather than made explicit, at least for me – but overall the pace keeps you going, and, like Saloum it is undeniably stylish and cool.

Zero is in selected UK cinemas from July 25th, and on digital platforms from 11th August.