Year 10
Like Luc Besson’s The Last Battle, this British post-apocalypse survival movie by writer-director Ben Goodger takes place a decade after an unspecified catastrophe which has led to the fall of civilisation and either robbed surviving humans of their power of speech or made their lives so wretched they aren’t motivated to talk to each other. After scavenging a prize package of biscuits from a long-wrecked car, the protagonist (Toby Goodger) has a bad day – his father (Duncan Lacroix) is killed and eaten by a band of roving cannibals and he has to hide in a full septic tank with a girl who could be his sister or love interest (Hannah Khalique-Brown).
The girl has a suppurating wound – probably not helped by being dunked in shit – and the cannibal clan loot the little family’s home-made yurt hideout of their last supply of medicines along with all else. Determined to retrieve a blister-pack of aspirin, the boy sets out to track the savages – though the fact he robs an old man of his boots, trousers and parka suggests he’s not far above the ferals on the morality scale – then comes to the camp of the bandits, who have an evil bearded patriarch.
Also features: packs of man-eating dogs, a lad even lower down the victim chain than the hero, a lot of runnning through woods, and a thrumming score which racks the tension up. It’s not a big picture apocalypse, building scenes around how to purify muddy water with a kettle, struggling with a padlock to get into a goodies locker, home-made bows and arrows which aren’t too reliable, and a great deal of scrabbling in mud and shit to make it through another day. It has a rough, tactile earthiness – with occasional shots of the beautiful woods to contrast with the struggle to live in them.
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