Carnage + The Post-Lifers

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In his follow-up to 2010’s The Ghost Writer, director Roman Polanski returns with his caustic and witty new film Carnage. Adapted from Yasmina Reza’s 2009 Tony-winning play God of Carnage, and featuring a top-notch cast of Jodie Foster (The Beaver, The Brave One), Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road, The Reader), John C. Reilly (Cyrus, and the upcoming We Need To Talk About Kevin) and Christoph Waltz (Water for Elephants, Inglorious Basterds,), Carnage is a captivating and explosively comic study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct. Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Carnage centers on two couples who meet to discuss a playground fight between two of their children. Harried corporate lawyer Alan (Waltz) and his put upon wife Nancy (Winslet), a succesful-flying broker, visit the apartment of Michael (Reilly), an amiable wholesaler, and Penelope (Foster), a self-consciously liberal writer, to discuss, logically and amiably, how to deal with the boys. However, as the evening wears on, the parents become increasingly childish and combative, words become weapons, prejudices rise to the surface and the meeting soon collapses into a storm of anger, recriminations, drunkenness and violence. Unfolding in real time, Polanski nimbly keeps the action flowing with an active camera that avoids the feeling of a play captured on film. Instead, its single-set confinement (the story essentially takes place over 80 minutes in one location) recalls Polanski's similarly claustrophobic studies of urban alienation and psychic disintegration in Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant. It is also a master-class in acting, and it’s a pure pleasure to watch the thespian one-upmanship as each character strives to dominate a deteriorating scenario. Carnage is ultimately a dark comedy about losing one’s manners. Alternately uproarious and devastating, it convincingly lays bare the darker tendencies of human nature.

Carnage is accompanied by the short The Post-Lifers: The Post-Lifers is a short live action comedy/mockumentary that depicts a zombie infestation from the zombies' perspective. The story starts with a documentarian following a small group of zombies on a typical night’s raid on a remote cottage. From there he gathers the collective perspectives of each character learning what it’s like to be a zombie, how they came to be, and how they cope with all of the problems involved in being undead. Examples of certain issues they have include their inability to move fast, their unending hunger for brains, the frustrations of body parts falling off, and dealing with being ostracized from the rest of society. ## Trailer

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