A survivor in a post-apocalyptic world reluctantly takes in a mysterious
mother and daughter.
Directed by: Stephen Fingleton
Starring: Mia Goth, Martin McCann, Olwyn Fouere
Movies set in the aftermath of a global collapse tend to open with a couple
of title cards or a piece of voiceover narration filling us in on how the
world got itself into a state where mohawks and leather vests have become
the mainstream fashion items.
The Survivalist is a movie that shuns
such cheap exposition; instead it opens with a simple but very effective
graph - two lines, one representing the world's population, the other oil
production rates, rise and rise in tandem before plummeting at an equal
rate. Debut writer-director Stephen Fingleton continues his
storytelling in such economic yet visually arresting style throughout.
After we're informed of the state of the post peak-oil world we're brought
to a dense forest somewhere in Ireland, where a young man (Martin McCann) ekes out a living in his remote cabin. Where gasoline is the currency of
George Miller's post-apocalyptic world, here it's vegetable seeds, which tells us just how far we've collapsed at
this point. McCann's unnamed survivalist runs a modest farm on his property,
violently dispatching intruders and dumping their corpses in a pit outside
the perimeter of his self-contained world.
One day he's caught off guard by the arrival of a pair of women - the
middle-aged Kathryn (Olwyn Fouere) and her teenage daughter Milja (Mia Goth). The survivalist is reluctant to take them in but the promise of sex with
Milja, after seven years of masturbating to wallet-sized photos of his
various victims' loved ones, is enough to convince him otherwise. Kathryn
asks for one favour - the survivalist isn't to get her daughter pregnant;
the pair are after his seeds, just not those ones.
The Survivalist is an exemplary piece
of low budget filmmaking. Experts will tell you to make the most of a tight
budget by confining your action to a single, easily accessible location and
a handful of characters. That's just what we get here, and Fingleton makes
the most out of his limited means. We don't see much of life beyond the
cabin, yet the director manipulates us into believing it's a terrifying
place. Tension and paranoia are increasingly heightened as our allegiances
switch back and forth among as visually striking a trio of performers as you
could possibly find - McCann with his haircut from hell, Fouere with her
silver mane, and the ethereal beauty of Goth, the latter a case
of nominative determinism if ever there were one.
The film's greatest achievement is in making us care about three characters
that could well be the villains in most movies. The post-apocalyptic genre
originally rose out of the ashes of the spaghetti western, and
The Survivalist is very much of that
lineage. In its locale and character dynamics, it's a scaled down, more
cinematic rival to
Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. While Tarantino's film is very much the rambling, out of control work of
an established director hanging himself with too much rope, Fingleton is
working with a comparative shoe-lace, one he keeps tautly coiled throughout.
In an era when so many filmmakers choose complex shots simply because they
can, Fingleton's work here is positively classical, with every shot, cut and
camera move serving a purpose. If there's any justice, his is a name we'll
be seeing applied to a larger canvas soon.
The Survivalist is on Amazon Prime
Video UK now.
