Survivre (Survive) (2024)
An intimate apocalypse movie – harking back to economical items like The Last Woman on Earth or Where Have All the People Gone? – with a family on a boating holiday near Cuba undergoing an ordeal when the polarity of the Earth reverses, raising the sea-bed into a near-desert studded with wrecked planes and boats and dumped toxic waste drums and odd items like dozens of legless office chairs … and presumably putting the sea somewhere where it’s proving massively inconvenient to offscreen civilisation.
Tom (Andreas Pietschmann), an oceanographer, and Julia (Emilie Dequenne), a doctor, have the regulation decent underneath but squabbling kids – birthday boy Ben (Lucas Ebel) and missing-her-boyfriend older sister Cassie (Lisa Delamar). They establish contact with Nao (Olivier Ho Hio Hen), pilot of a submersible which might well get through the inevitable restoration of the status quo, but there are only two spare places for survivors … and Ben sends up a flock of balloons which might draw a wandering maniac (Arben Bajraktaraj) with a breadknife taped to a barge-pole towards the wreck of the good yacht Orca … plus there’s the swarming threat of ‘arthropods from the abyss’, which tilts this tough, gritty little family picture into monster movie land for its third act.
Written by Alexandre Coquelle and Mathieu Oullion – the family are bilingual in English and French – and directed by Frederic Jardin, this is a lean little science fiction shocker which doesn’t oversell its eco-warrior credentials but nevertheless makes telling points about abuse of the environment. Notably, the arthropods have a much more relatable motivation for kill-craziness than the knife-on-a-stick guy. It makes great use of a rocky, inhospitable landscape – with most of the horrors taking place under a blazing sun in broad daylight, though there’s a memorable moment of dusk near the shell of a downed small plane.
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