Having zero prior knowledge of the film before diving in to watch it, I had no expectations for Les affamés. No reviews to get a rough idea. No articles read online mentioning the film's positives and negatives. Nothing.
That's a particularly difficult thing to achieve in a digital world, where everything is thrown into view; where words overrun your vision, making nothing entirely new and unexpected. That can be a problem, however, if said things fail to surprise. Although, in the case of Les affamés, the sudden gamble was an interesting experience.
Now, I say it was an interesting experience over a great experience for a reason: Les affamés is very much an arthouse film. It holds many secrets, and priorities visuals over dialogue for the vast majority of the runtime. For a zombie film, Les affamés is quiet, discomforting, strange, but most importantly, it's engaging as a result of those emotions it conveys. Les affamés understands that visual storytelling is as powerful is simple dialogue storytelling.
It's characters aren't particularly special, nor are they tough protagonists capable of withstanding the various threats of an infectious zombie-like end-of-the-world event. They're survivors simply getting by through any means necessary, this allows the cinematography to speak more than the words, by allowing their actions to push the film forwards.
With little dialogue, Les affamés ensures that it's strange world holds little answers. It hints towards this strange narrative of a hivemind mentality controlling the infected, as they seemingly collect and build strange structures around the land for unknown reasons; lingering in fields as they do absolutely nothing, only adding to the complete strangeness of the film.
Confusing at parts, Les affamés shines in its secretive nature. We know as little as the characters living within the world, and it allows its more horror-like elements to really stand out in all their unsettling manners. Its events take control, pushing what's typically the background in a zombie into the foreground. Characters don't have anything holding them down to a particular narrative; there's no 'A to B' adventure in hopes of finding the larger civilisations, the characters are simply our vehicle for discovering.
