Ireland
104 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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The Survivalist is both a very complex and a very simple movie, I don't really know how to explain it other than that. There are standards it adheres to in order to fit the post-apocalyptic model but as a whole it's not quite like anything else I've seen before.
The title doesn't refer to the kind of doomsday prepper type you may think of nowadays when you see the term "survivalist". Well, technically I can't be certain what it refers to, since I don't know the filmmakers' intent, but I would guess that surviving in this context refers not to a particular method or methods of living post- societal collapse, but to the overall notion of just surviving in such a world, doing whatever is necessary to ensure you go on living day-to-day. It's startling how much inhumanity is in this film, not brutality or intentional evil, but a total absence of anything that would betray any of the characters as having human feelings. This is truly a post-societal landscape.
It really drives home the point as well that if you can get yourself far enough from anybody else, you can do whatever you want. You can wear an elaborate hairstyle and have weird gardening practices and play the harmonica (possibly the film's only human touch) and there's nothing anyone can do to judge you, because the laws that governed behavior don't exist anymore. A lot of post-apocalyptic films don't get into that, they show survivors doing the same routine over and over of venturing out on some journey somewhere with a large backpack and some beef jerky, but they don't show what people would do if they could sustain themselves alone on a farm and not have to make a trek to find other survivors.
I know this is slow and I know it barely has any dialogue, and it might even border on invoking the P word (pretentious), but it's so well made and sticks so firmly to its premise of not showing any trace of manners or social niceties that I'm kind of amazed by it. There were points when the younger of the two women who came to stay on the protagonist's farm would say something too forward to him, and I almost expected the older woman to remind her not to upset the man, but this kind of calculated survival of two unarmed people against one armed person goes much further than just being polite to him. They survive around him on a more tactical level, one where it matters less if you insult him and more if you can manage to grab his shotgun shells while he thinks you're trying to get him off, or slip poison into his meal one day. What a well-constructed and unconventionally scary film. Not so much about how the world got to be this way as it is about how the new environment shapes human behavior.
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