Survivre (Survive) will be available on digital platforms starting September 30.
Disaster films are rarely seen in French cinema; therefore, they always spark my interest when they appear. In 2022, Quentin Reynaud brought us En plein feu (The Blaze), a hot and heavy eco-disaster film that all but vanished following its screening at the BFI London Film Festival. Now director Frédéric Jardin brings us another eco-disaster story, Survivre (Survive), which thankfully already has a UK distributor in Signature Entertainment.
Unlike the wildfire thriller The Blaze, Survivre’s eco-disaster messages are set within a rather odd mash-up of the family-in-peril thriller, the classic apocalyptic disaster movie, and traditional creature horror. It feels like this shouldn’t work on paper, but in practice, it does, and it’s all rather satisfying, at a brisk 1 hour and 30 minutes.
From magnetic pole reversal to dried-up oceans, a random psychopath, and an army of angry and snappy killer arthropods, Survivre is a blast from start to finish as you wonder what will arrive next to thwart our family in peril. However, it also offers a scathing commentary on our treatment of the planet, its oceans, and one another.
German oceanographer Tom (Andreas Pietschmann) and his French doctor wife Julia (Émilie Dequenne) are enjoying a leisurely yachting holiday with their two children, Cassie (Lisa Delamar) and Ben (Lucas Ebel), who also happens to be celebrating his thirteenth birthday, when a series of strange events invade their sailing trip. Something odd is happening in the Caribbean Sea as sea creatures migrate in large numbers, and whirlpools develop out of nowhere. But despite the strange events surrounding them, their vessel, the Orca (a nice nod to Jaws), appears solid and resilient until a large pod of migrating whales breaks the rudder and damages the yacht’s propellers. But these sea-bound concerns are just the start of their troubles, as a storm like no other brews, one that will see the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse, with land becoming ocean and the ocean becoming land.
Suddenly, the family is plunged into a post-apocalyptic world of dry, rugged sea beds. These mountainous landscapes were once home to fish, turtles, and marine mammals, but now bear the scars of the unseen pollution, wreckage, and rubbish that humans have dumped into the delicate blue cradle of life on our spinning globe.
As our family attempts to navigate the new world around them, they will encounter a mysterious traveller with deadly intentions, arthropods with a newfound taste for human flesh and survivors more interested in self-preservation than humanity and support. But as they learn from a distant voice on their radio, Nao (Olivier Ho Hio Hen), the pilot of a submersible left stranded, that the magnetic poles will shortly reverse again, leading the oceans to return to their rightful place, the family’s only hope is to find him and seek sanctuary and safety in the submersible. But will they all make it?
This bilingual English and French disaster flick, written by Alexandre Coquelle and Mathieu Oullion, generates a surprising amount of fear as it leans into its unique premise of a pole reversal. There are echoes of Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, along with some truly stunning visual effects and cinematography from Pierre Aïm (La Haine), which transcend the limits of the five million euro budget. Equally, its eco-credentials are strong without becoming overpowering from the plastic bottles that line the seabed to the uncovered nuclear waste dumped by humans in the deepest parts of our oceans. Most importantly, we care about our family and their survival thanks to the strong central performances of a committed and engaging cast, an essential ingredient of any disaster flick.
However, it should be noted that Survivre (Survive) takes more than a few odd detours, some of which are there to help tick the standard disaster film ingredients list. Notably, the mysterious traveller who penetrates the family’s security is there for one reason only, one that I have no intention of giving away here. He is just one example of a tick-box mentality that surrounds much of the action in Frédéric Jardin’s film. However, despite this weakness, Survivre (Survive) remains an engaging, dramatic and, at times, wonderfully creative disaster flick, and it’s, hands down, better than any similar eco-disaster movie Hollywood has offered us over the past five years.
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