The Horde is a French horror film which begins in copland but makes a swift From Dusk Till Dawn-style left turn very early on. It opens gritt­ily, with grizzled police colliding with brutal drug dealers in a sordid high rise as they attempt to take revenge for a slain colleague. But there are zombies – hordes of them – and they move fast enough to make 28 Days Later look more like 28 Days Behind. The deadly enmity between the two sides must go if anyone is to survive the threat.

The on-screen violence is of the savagely sustained and blood-soaked kind, an onslaught which bludgeons the viewer visually and aurally. With no weapons to hand, survivors have to bash in the heads of the flesh-hungry undead with their bare knuckles. There’s no real explanation for the apocalypse that explodes onto the city streets and spreads to the immigrant ghettos, unless humanity’s propensity for vicious self-destruction, its running headlong towards a logical conclus­ion where demand will inevitably outstrip supply, can be counted as one. “It’s like some sort of cry for help,” one character muses while a logjam of zombies presses keening and clawing against locked glass doors. “No,” says another, “they’re starving to death.” Even given the milieu of city slums, and the rampant racism of a barking mad elderly tenant decrying the influx of outsiders as he dispatches the flesh eaters, any intended sub-text tends to get lost in all that gore.

There are some stunning set pieces in Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher’s twin-helmed meat-mincer of a film. The sheer frenetic relentlessness of the uninfected humans, never mind the rabid zombies, reaches the point at which it surely has nowhere else to go. Admirably, the conclusion of the film is not wrapped up with a neat and redemptive Hollywood ribbon and bow for the least unlikeable characters. To the very end, The Horde is a big, raw and bloody hambone-cum-battering ram of a horror film.