Earth’s oceans first formed some 3.8 billion years ago. During mankind’s brief but eventful stay on this rock, they’ve largely been in the same place, moving with the tides, occasionally throwing up an iceberg or a tsunami or two, but largely keeping to themselves. What Survive asks is “what if they moved?”
Celebrating their son’s birthday on a yacht, a family find themselves caught up in Earth’s latest mass extinction event, and one which sees the oceans uprooted when the magnetic poles suddenly reverse. What this means for Julia (Émilie Dequenne), Tom (Andreas Pietschmann) and their children (Lucas Ebel and Lisa Delamar) is that the oceans have gone walkies – leaving their yacht stranded (but otherwise intact!) on a now dried-up ocean floor. The family must learn to adapt to this new world… and the terrors that have very suddenly been dredged up.
After a striking, genuinely tense opening, this high-concept apocalyptic thriller soon finds itself adrift in a vast ocean of silliness. A quest to get the family moving is concocted by director Frédéric Jardin and writers Alexandre Coquelle and Mathieu Oullion, the clock ticking before the poles reverse again. Along the way, the family are faced with all of the devastation that humanity has caused; fields of toxic waste barrels, mountains of plastic and a dogged asshole (Arben Bajraktaraj, genuinely unsettling) who’s hunting them for… reasons.
All of this was very clearly filmed at the bottom of a dusty ravine, but some effort is made to resemble the ocean floor – sprinklings of dead fish, a rotting whale and an encounter with a hammerhead shark. The film’s production design is ambitious but not always convincing – impressive but far too dry for what is being sold.
But there’s no accusing Survive of being dry, swinging for the fences in a narrative that plays out somewhere between The Day After Tomorrow and Mad Max; one minute the world is being flip-turned upside down, the next, we’re fighting it out with a madman over a can of Heinz baked beans.
Earth’s oceans first formed some 3.8 billion years ago, with our planet exploding into the universe around a billion years before that. If you’re reading this, you just happened to blink into existence at the exact same time as this deeply silly apocalyptic action film.
SURVIVE premiered at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest on August 24th, 2024.
