★★★★☆
A horror movie in everything but name, Morgan Spurlock’s Rats is a giddy, difficult, occasionally satirical, often stomach-churning thrill ride masquerading as a serious documentary. And all the better for it. Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame, has bounced back from the straight-faced ignominy of his 2013 corporate slop-fest, One Direction: This is Us, with a movie about rodents that has already been branded “the most disgusting film of the year”. Which is not technically true — there are still two weeks left of 2016.
Opening with a jagged, discordant title sequence in the style of David Fincher’s Seven, the movie quickly plunges us into the nightmarish world of Manhattan rat hunters, complete with ominous low-level camera work and carefully orchestrated jump scares (a man, a torch, a peek through a ceiling tile, and — boom — rat attack!). In doing so, Spurlock announces his contradictions from the start — yes, he’s going to give you a documentary about the worrying rise of rodent populations in modern cities, but he’s also going to poke you into a hysterical frenzy along the way.
The format is simple enough. It’s a globetrotting polemic that bounces from New York to New Orleans to Mumbai, Cambodia, Rajasthan and even Cheltenham, all the while ramping up the gross-factor and delivering ever more emetic scenes. “We are hardwired to be repulsed by these animals, probably for our survival,” says a scientist from the New York City Department of Health, racing through the mildly terrifying list of infections, parasites and plagues that happily live within the eponymous beasties (cue shock-cuts to shots of human infection, decaying limbs and bleeding eyes).
Soon we’re watching a group of scientists in Louisiana (where the rat population has boomed since Hurricane Katrina) dissecting rodents and producing live lung worms, kidney parasites and (dry-retch alert) a writhing fly larva the size of a brazil nut. It’s the most purely horror-movie sequence of the film — very Alien — and is boosted by the gagging sounds coming from the poor scientist with the scalpel (“Oh, my. I’ve never, eeuugghhh. Seen one of. Eeeuuggghhh. These. Euuughhh. Before”).
And on it goes. To a gang of middle-aged rat killers in Mumbai (they strangle the rodents with their bare hands) and a cute little old lady in Vietnam who buys kilos of live rats which she drowns in a bucket then, after chopping off their limbs, tails and heads, deep-fries for the customers in her restaurant. “They taste like chicken,” she says, “Only sweeter.” Yep. Right.
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The film closes with a blackly satirical sequence in Cheltenham where a local rat-killer unleashes his 22 terriers on to an infested farm while stout and hardy farming folk in Barbour jackets watch from the sidelines and talk about humane killing and cheer “hurrah!” while the rats get torn to shreds.
You couldn’t make it up. And luckily for Spurlock, he didn’t have to. He has wisely chosen not to appear before the camera for a single frame of the film (the subject is outré enough without needing a perpetually baffled, slightly nauseous narrator). And if he slightly overplays his provocateur role, it hardly matters. This is horror, after all.
Unrated, 84 min